The dialogue relative to Rosa Tazewell’s matrimonial project took place on the third day of Mrs. Sutton’s visit, in Mabel’s chamber, and when the former, having talked off the topmost bubbles of her righteous wrath, recollected several very important letters—­business and friendly—­she ought to have written a week ago, and trotted off to her room where she could perform the neglected duty without visible and outward temptation to that she was more fond of doing—­to wit, talking—­the young wife continued to work steadily, and with apparent composure.  It was not a bright face on which the light from the western windows fell, yet it was not unhappy.  She had never pretended to herself that her marriage was a step toward happiness, but she had believed that it would secure to her a larger share of peace, immunity from disturbance, and independence of thought and action, than fell to her lot in her brother’s house, and for these negative benefits she longed wearily.

Mr. Aylett was not wantonly or openly unkind to his ward, and ungenerous persecution was utterly incompatible with the temper and habits of his lady wife, but between them they had contrived to make the girl’s life very miserable.  It was Winston’s cue—­adopted, let us hope, from the strict sense of duty he avowed had ever actuated him in his treatment of the charge bequeathed him by his father—­to deport himself with calm, seldom-relaxed severity to one who had showed herself to be entirely unworthy of confidence; to exercise unremitting surveillance upon her personal association with young people out of the family and her correspondence, and to curb by look and oral reproof the most distant approach to what he condemned as indiscreet levity.  In a thousand ways—­many of them ingenious, and all severe, she was made to feel the curtailment of her liberty, and given to understand that it was the just retribution of her unlucky love-affair with an unprincipled adventurer.  Mrs. Aylett professed to discountenance this policy—­to be Mabel’s secret friend and ally, while she deemed it unwise to combat her husband’s will by overt measures for his sister’s protection.

Thus, for a year, the object of his real displeasure and her affected commiseration lived under a cloud, too proud to complain of her thraldom, but feeling it every second; mourning, in the seclusion of the trebly barred chambers of her heart, over her shattered idol and squandered affections, and fancying, in the morbid distrust engendered by the discovery of her lover’s baseness, and the weight of her brother’s unsparing reprobation of her insane imprudence, that she descried in every face, save Aunt Rachel’s, contempt or rebuke for the faux pas that had so nearly cast a stigma upon her name and lineage.