Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/162

Rh produced in her the quaint habit of half—loud soliloquy. “Fine feathers, Justine!” she laughed back at her laughing image. “You look like a phœnix risen from your ashes. But slip back into your own plumage, and you’ll be no more than a little brown bird without a song!”

The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her mother’s face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the wilderness for their tiny hearth—ﬁre, when her own efforts had fed the ﬂame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the chill of reaction that set in with her mother’s death.

She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high disinterestedness; but in the ﬁrst hours of her bereavement it seemed as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of [ 146 ]