She looked round the miserable room with a loathing
recognition of it. The sordid contrast which the place presented to
all that she had been accustomed to see in her own bed-chamber--the
practical abandonment, implied in its scanty furniture, of those elegant
purities of personal habit to which she had been accustomed from her
childhood--shocked that sense of bodily self-respect in Magdalen which
is a refined woman's second nature. Contemptible as the influence
seemed, when compared with her situation at that moment, the bare
sight of the jug and basin in a corner of the room decided her first
resolution when she woke. She determined, then and there, to leave
Rosemary Lane.
How was she to leave it? With Captain Wragge, or without him?
She dressed herself, with a dainty shrinking from everything in the room
which her hands or her clothes touched in the process, and then opened
the window. The autumn air felt keen and sweet; and the little patch of
sky that she could see was warmly bright already with the new sunlight.
Distant voices of bargemen on the river, and the chirping of birds among
the weeds which topped the old city wall, were the only sounds that
broke the morning silence.
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