Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

Mrs. Charlotte lay beside her man in Carslake cemetery, and Cousin Nellie had gone back to her old lady, and "Green Shutters" was empty, and Furze was in the thick of the lambing season. March days. And Mary wore black, and looked very well in it, rather like a dark pansy. "Poor Mrs. Fream, her father and mother dead within five weeks of each other." Poor Mrs. Fream indeed! No one spoke of Clare as "Poor Mrs. Biddulph." People grow old and pass, and elections come and go, and skirts are lengthened a little, and you wear your hat a little less like an inverted flower-pot perched on a dahlia stake to catch earwigs.

But something had happened to Mary. She was two selves in one body, and looking more like she used to look, poignant and vaguely plaintive, all swimming dark eyes and clotted cream. A chiffon overskirt--the superficial smartness--and the more solid and emotional underskirt beneath! Yes, suddenly she had rediscovered her emotions, and emotions are problematical possessions when you are mated to a signpost that points you nowhere, not even towards maternity. Mary was having a little religious revival of her own, and was going down on her silk-hosed knees, and feeling reproached by all manner of reflections. She had become full of sentimental contritions and self-confessions. She had not been a good daughter; she had made men suffer.--Poor dear things! For the last year she had been feeling very empty, and this emotional mood was quite pleasantly filling. It made her feel a serious person, and rather mysterious and romantic, a sort of little Diana of the Crossways--you know. A wistful look in your mirror, and an air of tristful languor in public, and a sense of being deeper than you thought you were, if you ever thought about it at all. A woman may grow chocolate-sick, and take to drinking vinegar for the sake of her figure. Diet, emotional and otherwise, has a distinct reaction upon the inward attitude toward the ordinary phenomena of life. Yet, did she confess to herself that behind the pale shades of her dead parents loomed that brown-throated, shaggy sloven of a farmer? "Doomsday"!