Like the rest of the world,
she had not in earlier years seen the furtiveness in his handsome face;
but at last, as his natural viciousness became stereotyped, and bad
habits matured and emphasized, she saw beneath his mask of low-class
comeliness. When at last she had found it necessary to dismiss the best
cook she ever had, because of him, they saw little of each other. This
was coincident with his failure at the ash-factory, where he mismanaged
and even robbed Jean Jacques right and left; and she had firmly insisted
on Jean Jacques evicting him, on the ground that it was not Sebastian
Dolores' bent to manage a business.
This little episode, as they drove home from Vilray, had an unreasonable
effect upon her.
It was like the touch of a finger which launches a boat balancing in the
ways onto the deep. It tossed her on a sea of agitation. She was swept
away on a flood of morbid reflection.
Her husband and her daughter, laughing and talking in the front seat of
the red wagon, seemed quite oblivious of her, and if ever there was a
time when their influence was needed it was now. George Masson was
coming over late this afternoon to inspect the work he had been doing;
and she was trembling with an agitation which, however, did not show upon
the surface.
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