She looked back over her life much as if she were glancing with a chill interest at a series of pictures which in no way concerned her . Scene after scene , face after face , flashed out on the background of the darkness . Emily 's mother had died at her birth , but Amelia Phillips , twenty years older than the baby sister , had filled the vacant place so well and with such intuitive tenderness that Emily had never been conscious of missing a mother . John Phillips , too , the grave , silent , elder brother , loved and petted the child . Woodford people were fond of saying that John and Amelia spoiled Emily shamefully . Emily Phillips had never been like the other Woodford girls and had no friends of her own age among them . Her uncommon beauty won her many lovers , but she had never cared for any of them until Stephen Fair , fifteen years her senior , had come a-wooing to the old , gray , willow-girdled Phillips homestead . Amelia and John Phillips never liked him . There was an ancient feud between the families that had died out among the younger generation , but was still potent with the older . From the first Emily had loved Stephen . Indeed , deep down in her strange , wayward heart , she had cared for him long before the memorable day when he had first looked at her with seeing eyes and realized that the quiet , unthought-of child who had been growing up at the old Phillips place had blossomed out into a woman of strange , seraph-like beauty and deep grey eyes whose expression was nevermore to go out of Stephen Fair 's remembrance from then till the day of his death . John and Amelia Phillips put their own unjustifiable dislike of Stephen aside when they found that Emily 's heart was set on him . The two were married after a brief courtship and Emily went out from her girlhood 's home to the Fair homestead , two miles away . Stephen 's mother lived with them . Janet Fair had never liked Emily . She had not been willing for Stephen to marry her . But , apart from this , the woman had a natural , ineradicable love of making mischief and took a keen pleasure in it . She loved her son and she had loved her husband , but nevertheless , when Thomas Fair had been alive she had fomented continual strife and discontent between him and Stephen . Now it became her pleasure to make what trouble she could between Stephen and his wife . She had the advantage of Emily in that she was always sweet-spoken and , on the surface , sweet-tempered .
Emily , hurt and galled in a score XXXXX petty ways , so subtle that they were beyond a man 's courser comprehension , astonished her husband by her fierce outbursts of anger that seemed to him for the most part without reason or excuse .
From after at in into like of on over with