If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression, remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her mother's grim unflagging resentment.

Every look and act of Mrs.Bart's seemed to say: "You are sorry for him now--but you will feel differently when you see what he has done to us." It was a relief to Lily when her father died.
Then a long winter set in.

There was a little money left, but to Mrs.
Bart it seemed worse than nothing--the mere mockery of what she was entitled to.

What was the use of living if one had to live like a pig?
She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against fate.

Her faculty for "managing" deserted her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it.