I
There hung about Dora Greene an atmosphere of moribundity and
stagnation that inevitably led her relations and acquaintances to
classify her as a bore.
Her conversation was monotonous, self-centred, and wound its
interminable way in and out among the intricacies of her numerous
afflictions. The neglect from which she was convinced she suffered,
the slights she so patiently endured, and the difficulty of making
ends meet on a reduced income formed the dim tapestry of her life.
The genuinely tragic accident which had robbed her of her son, lost
most of its poignancy by being endlessly referred to in this ignoble
context, and the one consistently vivid emotion in her life was her
passionate unsleeping jealousy of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Rodney
Greene. Apart from this and from the frequent scenes which it
occasioned--scenes of hysterical reproaches met reasonably though
unsympathetically--Dora Greene fumbled her way through each day,
accumulating new grievances and brooding over old ones.
Nevertheless, three times in her life she had lived purposely and
intensely: for half an hour before her first and only proposal;
during the few months that her husband was at the front; and for a
moment when her son was dying.