Thomas Hardy

Life's Little Ironies Thomas Hardy

The next time we get a glimpse of her is when she appears in the mournful attire of a widow. Mr. Twycott had never rallied, and now lay in a well-packed cemetery to the south of the great city, where, if all the dead it contained had stood erect and alive, not one would have known him orrecognized his name. The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave, and was now again at school. Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she was in nature though not inyears. She was left with no control over anything that had been her husband's beyond her modestpersonal income. In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he had safeguarded withtrustees all he possibly could. The completion of the boy's course at the public school, to befollowed in due time by Oxford and ordination, had been all previsioned and arranged, and shereally had nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink, and make a business ofindolence, and go on weaving and coiling the nut-brown hair, merely keeping a home open for theson whenever he came to her during vacations. Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in his lifetime had purchased forher use a semi-detached villa in the same long, straight road whereon the church and parsonagefaced, which was to be hers as long as she chose to live in it. Here she now resided, looking outupon the fragment of lawn in front, and through the railings at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bendingforward over the window-sill on the first floor, stretching her eyes far up and down the vista ofsooty trees, hazy air, and drab house-façades, along which echoed the noises common to a suburbanmain thoroughfare.