At the Gildersleeves', too, the house that day was alive with
excitement.
Gwendoline had thrown herself into a fever of alarm as soon as she
had posted her letter to Granville Kelmscott. She went up to her
own room, flung herself wildly on the hed, and sobbed herself into
a half-hysterical, half-delirious state, long before dinner-time.
She hardly knew herself at first how really ill she was. Her hands
were hot and her forehead burning. But she disregarded such mere
physical and medical details as those, by the side of a heart too
full for utterance. She thought only of Granville, and of that
horrid man who had threatened with such evident spite and rancour
to ruin him.
She lay there some hours alone, in a high fever, before her mother
came up to her room to fetch her. Mrs. Gildersleeve was a subdued
and soft-voiced woman, utterly crushed, so people said, by the
stronger individuality of that blustering, domineering, headstrong
man, her husband. And to say the truth, the eminent Q.C. had taken
all the will out of her in twenty-three years of obedient slavery.
She was pretty still, to be sure, in a certain faded, jaded,
unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression
of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the
victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure.
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