With a certain pleasure she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as her test: which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad.

How did she know that at this very moment both her children were not lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses?
"It's happening to somebody: why shouldn't it happen to me ?" she would argue, her face taking on the stoical expression of anticipated sorrow.

However sincere these views may have been, they were undoubtedly called forth by the irrational state of her niece's mind.
It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion which naturally became dark as well as stable.

Perhaps Mrs.Ambrose had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she might discover what was in Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen's theories down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the "croaking of a raven in the mud." "It's hard enough without that," she asserted.
"What's hard ?" Helen demanded.
"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.
Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a spectator.

True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere, although there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose.