The Boarding-House

It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched myself too
suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice, now, but to
bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt asunder, and that
illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago cut off) by which a
past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one. I was full
of idle and shapeless regrets. The thought impressed itself upon me
that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in
the place of destiny and avert misfortune from my friends, I had
resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency, between instinct and
intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's
passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing
my heart.

But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is
cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to
Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much
sympathy, rather than too little.

To escape the irksomeness of these meditations, I resumed my post at
the window. At first sight, there was nothing new to be noticed. The
general aspect of affairs was the same as yesterday, except that the
more decided inclemency of to-day had driven the sparrows to shelter,
and kept the cat within doors; whence, however, she soon emerged,
pursued by the cook, and with what looked like the better half of a
roast chicken in her mouth. The young man in the dress-coat was
invisible; the two children, in the story below, seemed to be romping
about the room, under the superintendence of a nursery-maid. The
damask curtains of the drawing-room, on the first floor, were now fully
displayed, festooned gracefully from top to bottom of the windows,
which extended from the ceiling to the carpet. A narrower window, at
the left of the drawing-room, gave light to what was probably a small
boudoir, within which I caught the faintest imaginable glimpse of a
girl's figure, in airy drapery. Her arm was in regular movement, as if
she were busy with her German worsted, or some other such pretty and
unprofitable handiwork.