CHARLES DICKENS DOMBEY AND SON CHAPTER I Dombey and ...

frozen up in the bold, angry hardihood with which she stood, upon the brink
of a deep precipice unseen by Florence, daring to look down.
There was but one consideration to set against the heavy loss of Edith, and
though it was slight comfort to her burdened heart, she tried to think it
some relief. No longer divided between her affection and duty to the two,
Florence could love both and do no injustice to either. As shadows of her
fond imagination, she could give them equal place in her own bosom, and
wrong them with no doubts.
So she tried to do. At times, and often too, wondering speculations on the
cause of this change in Edith would obtrude themselves upon her mind and
frighten her; but in the calm of its abandonment once more to silent grief
and loneliness, it was not a curious mind. Florence had only to remember
that her star of promise was clouded in the general gloom that hung upon the
house, and to weep and be resigned.
Thus living, in a dream wherein the overflowing love of her young heart
expended itself on airy forms, and in a real world where she had experienced
little but the rolling back of that strong tide upon itself, Florence grew
to be seventeen. Timid and retiring as her solitary life had made her, it
had not embittered her sweet temper, or her earnest nature. A child in
innocent simplicity; a woman in her modest self-reliance, and her deep
intensity of feeling; both child and woman seemed at once expressed in her
fair face and fragile delicacy of shape, and gracefully to mingle there;--as
if the spring should be unwilling to depart when summer came, and sought to
blend the earlier beauties of the flowers with their bloom. But in her
thrilling voice, in her calm eyes, sometimes in a strange ethereal light
that seemed to rest upon her head, and always in a certain pensive air upon
her beauty, there was an expression, such as had been seen in the dead boy;
and the council in the Servants'Hall whispered so among themselves, and
shook their heads, and ate and drank the more, in a closer bond of
goodfellowship.
This observant body had plenty to say of Mr. and Mrs. Dombey, and of Mr.
Carker, who appeared to be a mediator between them, and who came and went as