Page:Gissing - The Emancipated, vol. I, 1890.djvu/11



a window looking from Posilipo upon the Bay of Naples sat an English lady, engaged in letter-writing. She was not more than four and twenty, but her attire of subdued mourning indicated widowhood already at the stage when it is permitted to make quiet suggestion of freedom rather than distressful reference to loss; the dress, however, was severely simple, and its grey coldness, which would well have harmonized with an English sky in this month of November, looked alien in the southern sunlight. There was no mistaking her