It was the cheapening--the vulgarizing, so to speak, of her whole existence.
In the course of their long embrace Mrs.Leyburn let fall various items of news that showed Catherine very plainly who had been at work upon her mother, and one of which startled her.
'He comes back tonight, my dear--and he goes on Saturday.

Oh, and, Catherine, Mrs.Thornburgh says he does care so much.

Poor young man!' And Mrs.Leyburn looked, up at her now standing daughter with eyes as woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.
'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored.

'You won't sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs.Thornbourgh than I am already.' Mrs.Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which the worn wedding ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left her at last to sleep.
'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed widow to herself, 'Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!' Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle.

Her struggle was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy.
Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent generation.