All the scruples, and sacrifices, and tearing asunder of human desires to make them fit words that were called ideals, all amounted to this same nothingness in the end.

What was Cousin Hetty’s life now, with its tiny inhibitions, its little passivities?  The same nothingness it would have been, had she grasped boldly at life’s realities and taken whatever she wanted.

And all Cousin Hetty’s mother’s sacrifices for her, her mother’s hopes for her, the slow transfusion of her mother’s life to hers; that was all dead now, had been of no avail against this nothingness.  Some day Elly would lie like that, and all that she had done for Elly, or could do for her, would be only a pinch of ashes.  If she, if Cousin Hetty, if Cousin Hetty’s mother, if Elly, if all of them, took hotly whatever the hours had to give, they could not more certainly be brought to nothingness and oblivion in the end. . . .

Those dreams of her . . . being one with a great current, sweeping forward . . . what pitiful delusions! . . .  There was nothing that swept forward.  There were only futile storms of froth and excitement that whirled you about to no end, one after another.  One died down and left you becalmed and stagnant, and another rose.  And that would die down in its turn.  Until at the end, shipwreck, and a sinking to this darkly silent abyss.

CHAPTER XX

A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE

July 21.  Evening.

Cousin Hetty lay coldly dead; and Marise felt herself blown upon by an icy breath that froze her numb.  The doctor had come and gone, queerly, and bustlingly alive and full of talk and explanations; Agnes had come back and, silently weeping, had walked endlessly and aimlessly around the house, with a broom in her idle hand; one after another of the neighbors had come and gone, queerly alive as usual, they too, for all their hushed and awkward manners; Neale had come, seeming to feel that cold breath as little as the others.

And now Neale was gone, after everything had been decided, all the incredibly multitudinous details that must be decided.  The funeral was set for the day after tomorrow, and until then, everything in everybody’s life was to stop stock-still, as a matter of course.  Because Agnes was in terror of being left alone for an instant, Marise would not even leave the house until after the funeral, and one of the thousand petty unescapable details she and Neale had talked of in the hushed voice which the house imposed on all in it, was the decision as to which dress and hat were to be sent to her from the wardrobe at home.

She was to stay there with Agnes, she, who was all the family old Cousin Hetty had left, for the last watch over what lay up there on the bed in her bedroom.  Neale would look out for the children (there was no one else for the moment, Toucle was gone, Eugenia quite useless), would telegraph the few old friends who would care to know the news, would see Mr. Bayweather about the funeral, would telephone the man in West Ashley who dug graves, would do what was to be done outside; and she would do what was to be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs waiting in case the undertaker needed something.