Cornelia began to laugh, but interrupted herself, half-way, with a sob.
She was seized by a fantasy that if Sophie died an old maid her sister
would have been the cause of it--would be a murderess! The sudden
jarring of this idea--tragical enough, even without the ghastly spice of
reality that there was about it--against the ludicrous element with
which tradition flavors the name of old maid--caught the young woman at
unawares, and threw her rudely out of her nervous control. It was a
result which could scarcely have happened, had she been less morbidly
and unnaturally excited and strained to begin with; as it was, it may
have been an outbreak which had long been brewing, and to which Sophie's
answer had but given the needful stimulus.
The sob was succeeded by a convulsion of painful laughter, that would
go on the more Cornelia tried to stop it. At last, in gasping for
breath, the laughter gave way to an outburst of tears and sobs, which
seemed, in comparison, to be a relief. But at the first intermission,
the discordant laughter came again: she hid her face in her hands, and
made wild efforts to control herself: she slipped from her stool, and
flung herself at full length upon the floor. Now, the paroxysms of
laughing and crying came together, her body was shaken, strained, and
convulsed in every part: she was breathless, flushed, and faint.
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