That night, after the household was abed, Thomasin sat in her own small room at the top of the house with the window open on the wet roofs and the candle guttering, and read the paragraph seven times. Then she took out a sheet of paper and wrote the answer about the oats at Hull, plainly and practically, in the voice of a woman who had grown up in a counting house; and when she had finished, she sat for a long time with the pen in her hand, and then she wrote on:
"You say you walk about your house like a man in someone else's coat. I know that feeling exactly. I have lived for some years in a house that is not mine, and been kindly treated in it, and still I go up and down the stairs as though somebody might ask me at any moment what I am doing there. One learns to walk softly. One learns which boards creak.
"But I think a coat that is not yours will take your shape, if you wear it long enough. My father used to say that about his surplice; he said it hung on him like a sail for the first ten years and like a shroud for the last ten, and only fitted him for the middle part, but that the middle part was very good.
"You said you would like to be the reason. I will tell you a secret: you were, a little, already. I had expected you to be dull."
She stopped. She looked at what she had written about her father's surplice, and remembered that Dorothea's father was a wool merchant who had never worn a surplice in his life, and that Lord Carrowby knew it.
She struck the paragraph out, and then, because a page with a paragraph struck out could not be sent to an earl, copied the whole letter fair again without it. The new version said only: "I have lived in houses where I did not feel at home, and walked softly in them. One learns which boards creak. I think a coat that is not yours will take your shape if you wear it long enough." And then the line about the secret, and the line about dullness, which she could not, at one o'clock in the morning, bring herself to lose.
In the morning, Dorothea signed it at the bottom with her careful aimed D, and asked, "Did you put in about Hull?"
"Yes."
"Then it will do." She dusted the sand off with the side of her hand. "You look tired, Tam. You should not sit up with those novels."
"No," said Thomasin. "I shan't."
III.
All that summer it rained. It was the summer people afterward called the year without one, though nobody knew then that it would end; they only knew that the wheat lay flat and blackening in the fields round Bath, that the Avon came up over the lower meadows twice in August, that ladies wore pelisses to the Sydney Gardens and the band played under umbrellas to nobody. In the north it was worse. Letters from Carrowby came every ten or twelve days, and each was a little longer than the last, and each brought the weather with it like a smell on a coat.