Read Cold Mountain for Free Online Page B

her legs. They were marked variously by scratches and nips, none of them deep enough to draw blood. Her face and neck stung from scratches taken when she scrabbled out of the bush. She patted at her hair and found it moiled all about her head. This is the place I have reached, she thought. I am living in a new world where these are the fruits of even looking for eggs.
    She rose from the chair and climbed the steps to her room and removed her clothes. At her marble-topped washstand, she poured water from the pitcher into the basin and washed off with a piece of lavender soap and a cloth. She ran her fingers through her hair to rake out the boxwood leaves and then just let it fall loose below her shoulders. She had abandoned both of the current hairstyles—either gathered all around and swept into two big rolls that hung from the sides of a woman’s head like the ears of a hound, or pulled tight to the scalp and bunned at the back like a mud-tailed horse. She no longer had need or patience for such updos. She could go about looking like a man-woman in a bookplate and it didn’t matter, for she sometimes went up to a week or ten days without seeing another soul.
    She went to her chest of drawers for clean underdress and found none, laundry having been neglected for some time. She put on linens she drew from near the bottom of the dirty clothes pile, theorizing that perhaps time had made them fresher than the ones she had just taken off. She topped them with a somewhat clean dress and wondered how she might get through the hours until bedtime. When had things altered so that she no longer thought of how to pass the day pleasantly or profitably and began to think merely of how to pass the day?
    Her will to do was near gone. All she had accomplished of note in the months since Monroe’s death was to sort through his things, his clothes and papers. Even that had been a trial, for she had a strange and fearful feeling about her father’s room and had not been able to enter it until many days after the funeral. But during that time she had often stood at the door and looked in as people are drawn to stand at the lip of a cliff and look down. Water had stood in a pitcher at his washstand until it went away of its own accord. When she had finally drawn together the nerve to do it, she went in and sat on the bed, weeping as she folded the well-made white shirts, the black suitcoats and pants for storage. She sorted and labeled and boxed Monroe’s papers, his sermons and botanical notes and commonplace journals. Each little task had brought with it a new round of mourning and a string of empty days that eventually ran together until now she had arrivedat such a state that the inevitable answer to the question, What have you accomplished this day? was, Nothing.
    Ada took a book from her bedside table and went into the upper hall and sat in the stuffed chair she had pulled from Monroe’s bedroom and situated to catch the good light from the hall window. She had spent much of the past three damp months sitting in the chair reading, a quilt wrapped around her to hold back the chill of the house even in July. The books she had drawn from the shelves that summer had been varied and haphazard, little but recent novels, whatever she happened to pick up from Monroe’s study. Trifles like
Sword and Gown
by Lawrence and many others of its type. She could read such books and a day later not know what they had been about. When she had read more notable books, the harsh fates of their doomed heroines served only to deepen her gloom. For a time, every book she plucked from the shelves frightened her, their contents all concerning mistakes made by wretched dark-haired women so that they ended their days punished, exiled, and alien. She had gone straight from
The Mill on the Floss
to a slim and troubling tale by Hawthorne on somewhat the same theme. Monroe had apparently not finished it, for the pages were uncut beyond the third chapter. She