If she can keep to her resolutions and if George will only be still fond of her, things may yet go well with them. Aunt Naomi dryly observed yesterday that what has happened will be likely to prevent Mrs. Weston for a long time to come from trying to make a display, and so it may be the best thing that could have befallen her. So much depends upon George, though!
November 30. The dinner went off much better than I could have hoped. Dr. Wentworth allowed Gertrude to leave her room for the first time, and George brought her down to dinner in his arms. She was given only a quarter of an hour, but this served for the topic of talk, and George was so tender with his wife that Miss Charlotte was quite warmed to him.
The two babies of course had to be produced, but it was rather painful to see how thin and spindling the little Weston baby looked beside my bonny Thomasine. Tomine has grown really to know me. She will come scrambling like a little crab across the floor toward me if I appear in the nursery. Hannah and Rosa are both jealous of me, and I triumph over them in a fashion little less than inhuman.
I am glad Thanksgiving is over, for in spite of all any of us might do to seem perfectly at ease, some sense of constraint and uncomfortableness was always in the background. On the whole, however, we did very well; and Miss Charlotte sat with me far into the twilight, talking of Mother.
December 1. I dreamed last night a dream which affected me so strongly that I can hardly write of it without shivering. I dreamed that George came with Mr. Saychase to remarry, as I thought, Gertrude. When we all stood by the side of her bed, however, George seized my hand, and announced that he had come to marry me, and was resolved to have no other wife. Gertrude fell back on her pillow in a faint. I struggled to pull away the hand George had taken, but I was powerless. I tried to scream, but that horrible paralysis which sometimes affects us in dreams left me speechless. I felt myself helpless while Mr. Saychase went on marrying me to George before the eyes of his own wife, in spite of anything I could do to prevent it. The determination to be free of this bond struggled in me so strongly against the helplessness which held me that I sprang up in bed at last, awake and bursting into hysterical crying.