Like the rest of the world, she had not in earlier years seen the furtiveness in his handsome face; but at last, as his natural viciousness became stereotyped, and bad habits matured and emphasized, she saw beneath his mask of low-class comeliness.

When at last she had found it necessary to dismiss the best cook she ever had, because of him, they saw little of each other.

This was coincident with his failure at the ash-factory, where he mismanaged and even robbed Jean Jacques right and left; and she had firmly insisted on Jean Jacques evicting him, on the ground that it was not Sebastian Dolores' bent to manage a business.
This little episode, as they drove home from Vilray, had an unreasonable effect upon her.
It was like the touch of a finger which launches a boat balancing in the ways onto the deep.

It tossed her on a sea of agitation.

She was swept away on a flood of morbid reflection.
Her husband and her daughter, laughing and talking in the front seat of the red wagon, seemed quite oblivious of her, and if ever there was a time when their influence was needed it was now.