Her imagination worked on, mapping out days and months to her fascinated heart.

Then Sleep came nearer, and turned the self-ordered dream into that which the dreamer mistook for reality.

In that far-off home she saw all the bareness and roughness of the lonely life which, do what she would, she could not greatly alter; and there again Bates kissed her; she felt his touch in all its reality, and in her dream she measured the barrenness of the place against the knowledge that her love was his life.
The soul that lay dreaming in this way was the soul of a heavy-limbed, ungracious woman.

She lay now on the floor in ungainly attitude, and all the things that were about her in the darkness were of that commonest type with which ignorance with limited resource has essayed to imitate some false ideal of finery, and produced such articles as furniture daubed with painted flowers, jute carpets, and gowns beflounced and gaudy.

Yet this soul, shut off from the world now by the curtain of sleep, was spoken to by an angel who blended his own being into recollections of the day, and treated with her concerning the life that is worthy and the life that is vain.
Eliza awoke with a start.