Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/160

Rh they fell—all her features being so ﬂuid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some antique bust.

Mrs. Dressel’s face softened at the note of weariness in the girl’s voice. “Are you very tired, dear?” she asked drawing her down to a seat on the sofa.

“Yes, and no—not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit.” Justine Brent drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between Mrs. Dressel’s plump ﬁngers. Seated thus, with hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have ﬁgured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward her friend’s, cast off its shadows and resumed the look of a plaintive child.

“The worst of it is that I don’t look forward with any interest to taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be merely physical—I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But in myself it seems different—it seems to go to the roots of the world. You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me over the ugly details—the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust remains. Oh, Effie, I don’t want to be a ministering angel any more—I want to be uncertain, coy [ 144 ]