regular
attendant at divine service; and on this particular Sunday morning of which I
began with speaking she stood at the window of her little drawing-room, watching
the long arm of a rose-tree that was attached to her piazza, but a portion of
which had disengaged itself, sway to and fro, shake and gesticulate, against the
dusky drizzle of the sky. Every now and then, in a gust of wind, the rose-tree
scattered a shower of water-drops against the window-pane; it appeared to have a
kind of human movement - a menacing, warning intention. The room was very cold;
Madame Münster put on a shawl and walked about. Then she determined to have some
fire; and summoning her ancient negress, the contrast of whose polished ebony
and whose crimson turban had been at first a source of satisfaction to her, she
made arrangements for the production of a crackling flame. This old woman's name
was Azarina. The Baroness had begun by thinking that here would be a savory
wildness in her talk, and, for amusement, she had encouraged her to chatter. But
Azarina was dry and prim; her conversation was anything but African; she
reminded Eugenia of the tiresome old ladies she met in society. She knew,
however, how to make a fire; so that after she had laid the logs, Eugenia, who
was terribly bored, found a quarter of an hour's entertainment in sitting and
watching them blaze and sputter. She had thought it very likely Robert Acton
would come and see her; she had not met him since that infelicitous evening. But
the morning waned without his coming; several times she thought she heard his
step on the piazza; but it was only a window-shutter shaking in a rain-gust. The
Baroness, since the beginning of that episode in her career of which a slight
sketch has been attempted in these pages, had had many moments of irritation.
But to-day her irritation had a peculiar keenness; it appeared to feed upon
itself. It urged her to do something; but it suggested no particularly
profitable line of action. If she could have done something at the moment, on
the spot, she would have stepped upon a European steamer and turned her back,
with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying failure, her visit to
her American relations. It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed
this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest
distinction for which allowance had been made in American institutions. Her
irritation came, at bottom