Manslaughter by Alice Duer Miller

When Lydia came back from the Emmonses late Monday afternoon she brought Bobby Dorset with her. Miss Bennett, who was arranging Morson's vases of flowers according to her more fastidious ideas, heard them come in, as noisy and high-spirited, she thought, as a couple of puppies. Lydia was so busy giving orders to have Bobby's room got ready and to have Eleanor telephoned to come over to dinner in case they wanted to play bridge, and sending the car for her, because Eleanor was so near-sighted she couldn't drive herself, and always let her chauffeur go home, and he had no telephone -- so incompetent of Eleanor -- that Miss Bennett had no chance to exchange a word with her. Besides, the poor lady was taken up with the horror of the approaching bridge game. She liked a mild rubber now and then, but not with Lydia, who scolded her after each hand, remembering every play.

Lydia, who was almost without physical or moral timidity, was always fighting against a subconscious horror, a repulsion rather than a fear, that life was just a futile, gigantic, patternless confusion, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, which is the horror of all materialists. When she walked into her bedroom and found her things laid out just as usual, and a new maid -- a Frenchwoman, brown and middle-aged and competent -- waiting for her, just as Evans had waited, one of her moods of deep depression engulfed her, just as those who fear death are sometimes brought to a realization of its approach by some everyday symbol. Lydia did not fear death, but sometimes she hated life. She never asked if it were her own relation to life that was unsatisfactory.