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Updated: May 10, 2025
She wished much that she could have talked to her husband more freely, but she had not learned to feel at home with him. Yet he had been kinder and more attentive than usual all the time, so much so that Letty thought with herself if she gave him a boy, he would certainly return to his first devotion. She said boy, because any one might see he cared little for Phosy.
She launched into a list of all the great nobodies and small somebodies who were to be there, and whom she positively must see: it might be her only chance. Those last words quenched a sarcasm on Augustus' lips. He was kinder than usual the rest of the evening, and read her to sleep with the Pilgrim's Progress. Phosy sat in a corner, listened, and understood.
Little Sophy or, as she called herself by a transposition of consonant sounds common with children, Phosy found her nurse Alice in the nursery. But she was lost in the pages of a certain London weekly, which had found her in a mood open to its influences, and did not even look up when the child entered. With some effort Phosy drew off her gloves, and with more difficulty untied her hat.
Towards morning they were ebbing slowly away. Letty did not know that her husband was watching by her bedside. The street was quiet now. So was the house. Most of its people had been up throughout the night, but now they had all gone to bed except the strange nurse and Mr. Greatorex. It was the morning of Christmas Day, and little Phosy knew it in every cranny of her soul.
Phosy crept back to her seat, pale, frightened, and a little hurt. Alice hung up the jacket, closed the wardrobe, and, turning, contemplated her own pretty face and neat figure in the glass opposite. The dinner-bell rang. "There, I declare!" she cried, and wheeled round on Phosy. "And your hair not brushed yet, miss! Will you ever learn to do a thing without being told it?
He stepped forward, and saw Phosy, half shrouded in blue, the candle behind illuminating the hair she had found too rebellious to the brush, and making of it a faint aureole about her head and white face, whence cold and sorrow had driven all the flush, rendering it colourless as that upon her arm which had never seen the light.
It is not by pressing our insights upon them, but by bathing the sealed eyelids of the human kittens, that we can help them. And all the time poor little Phosy was left to the care of Alice, a clever, careless, good-hearted, self-satisfied damsel, who, although seldom so rough in her behaviour as we have just seen her, abandoned the child almost entirely to her own resources.
The same moment her father raised the little mother and clasped her to his bosom. Her arms went round his neck, her head sank on his shoulder, and sobbing in grievous misery, yet already a little comforted, he bore her from the room. "No, no, Phosy!" they heard him say, "Jesus is not dead, thank God. It is only your little brother that hadn't life enough, and is gone back to God for more."
Phosy went to bed to dream of the Valley of Humiliation. The next morning Alice gave her mistress warning. It was quite unexpected, and she looked at her aghast. "Alice," she said at length, "you're never going to leave me at such a time!" "I'm sorry it don't suit you, ma'am, but I must." "Why, Alice? What is the matter? Has Sophy been troublesome?" "No, ma'am; there's no harm in that child."
Phosy was utterly forgotten, but she dressed herself, and at the usual hour appeared with her prayer-book in her hand ready for church. When her father told her that he was not going, she looked so blank that he took pity upon her, and accompanied her to the church-door, promising to meet her as she came out.
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