Hester sat at the open window of her boudoir in the dark.

She had herself put out the wax candles, because she wanted to feel herself surrounded by the soft blackness.

She had sat through the dinner and heard her husband's anxious inquiries about the rotten handrail, and had watched his disturbed face and Emily's pale one.

She herself had said but little, and had been glad when the time came that she could decently excuse herself and come away.
As she sat in the darkness and felt the night breath of the flowers in the garden, she was thinking of all the murderers she had ever heard of.
She was reflecting that some of them had been quite respectable people, and that all of them must have lived through a period in which they gradually changed from respectable people to persons in whose brains a thought had worked which once they would have believed impossible to them, which they might have scouted the idea of their giving room to.
She was sure the change must come about slowly.

At first it would seem too mad and ridiculous, a sort of angry joke.