The Scowl and Smile

Several days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one
inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure), an easterly storm had
set in, and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black
roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before.
Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.

As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect.