Supreme Court—it seemed to her that her life also was over. What remained would be as gray as the ashes of an Indian widow who has committed suttee, a dignified passivity, a kind of subdued suspension of any real living. She was perfectly aware, if with a certain complacency, that she was hopelessly out of date and fashion, that she lived in an age of wedding feasts supplied with funeral baked meats, that the relict was supposed to prove that her marriage had been happy by contracting another in a year's time or less. But she cared nothing for any of this. She had been Mrs. Stuart Hamill from the age of twenty-three to that of sixty; her two daughters were married and settled; she had her memories, her dogs and her books. It should be enough. It might even have been greedy to want more. How many individuals among the starved and tortured millions who had populated the planet since our cave ancestors, had enjoyed a fraction of what she had enjoyed? How many had her health, her love, her amusements?
