II

Ethel Grandin stood in the middle of the small low-ceilinged room which had been her bedroom during her childhood and which was furnished now with a double bed for those rare occasions when she came home to her parents’ house with her husband. Her bags were packed and she was ready to go, but still she remained in the room, frowning uncertainly as if there was something she had forgotten to do. She heard her father back the car out of the garage and sound the horn. She went to the window, called, “Just a minute, I’ll be right down,” and yet remained.

Her mother had taken the children downtown, to be out of the way when she should go. But they had already accepted the fact that they were to stay with their grandparents in Maine and would probably miss her very little, if at all.

She picked up the telegram she had received from her husband and read it again. She was glad about the new appointment, and happy for him that his book had been taken by Scribners, the book which had been keeping him from her for so long; but she couldn’t help wondering if his new duties at the University and the extra work and time which they would entail might not come between them even more.

A photograph of her husband stood on the dresser. It was a good likeness and she loved the picture; he had always seemed to her a very handsome man. He had thick sandy hair with a slight wave, and a full mustache of the same sandy color. The forehead was almost his best feature, it was high and clear, with a real distinction. The eyes were light brown: honest, and very young looking. His nose had substantial manly nostrils and the mouth was wide and firm, with full and rather sensual lips. She remembered well how those lips parted slightly when they kissed her—when they covered her own mouth completely—and how an intoxication swept through her then as if that moment were almost enough. She gazed at the photograph of the only man she had ever loved or wanted in her life and wondered how long it had been since he had kissed her like that. Weeks? Months? Could it really be months? It was well that she didn’t know. Had she known exactly she might have had real reason for despair. As it was, she could still go on from day to day in the hope that tonight might be the night, or at most tomorrow.

Because she had been brought up in a loveless house, Ethel Cameron had wanted only one thing from life: love. During all her adolescence she had seen her parents living in a waste of days, useless to one another, strangers, living as solitarily together as if each lived alone, getting nothing from marriage and thus giving and getting nothing from themselves. In her teens she had made a private promise that when or if she would one day meet the man she loved, she would give herself to that man to her fullest bent and live solely for him. This she had done. But she had come late to love. Perhaps even it was her fault; perhaps he was too old for her, or she too young. She was twenty-­three when she first met and fell in love with John Grandin and he was ten years older. Or maybe he was the one who had come to love too late. Which may have been why (she didn’t know; she really knew nothing about these things apart from herself, or about how it was with other people) he had retired early into a kind of separate life of his own, leaving her so unsatisfied in love that sometimes she thought she couldn’t bear it. The children should have made a difference but they did not; much as she loved them, it was the love of her husband she wanted even more. She had had it so intensely during their first few years that now her life seemed almost dangerously empty.

It was ten in the morning; in another six hours they would be meeting at Woods Hole on the Cape, after a separation which to her seemed weeks longer than a week; by nightfall they would be in the same bedroom, possibly (at last) in the same bed. Her heart sank at the thought; and instead of feelings of love, she discovered in herself an unexpected anger.

The horn sounded again from the drive below. She picked up her two bags and ran downstairs.