"
This was a difficult time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would
endure it to the end, but that it must be his last adventure of the
kind. Mrs. Hudson divided her time between looking askance at her son,
with her hands tightly clasped about her pocket-handkerchief, as if she
were wringing it dry of the last hour's tears, and turning her eyes
much more directly upon Rowland, in the mutest, the feeblest, the most
intolerable reproachfulness. She never phrased her accusations, but he
felt that in the unillumined void of the poor lady's mind they loomed
up like vaguely-outlined monsters. Her demeanor caused him the acutest
suffering, and if, at the outset of his enterprise, he had seen, how
dimly soever, one of those plaintive eye-beams in the opposite scale,
the brilliancy of Roderick's promises would have counted for little.
They made their way to the softest spot in his conscience and kept it
chronically aching. If Mrs. Hudson had been loquacious and vulgar, he
would have borne even a less valid persecution with greater fortitude.
But somehow, neat and noiseless and dismally lady-like, as she sat
there, keeping her grievance green with her soft-dropping tears, her
displeasure conveyed an overwhelming imputation of brutality.
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