Summer

by Edith Wharton

she found it easier to take North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.

the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and North Dormer shrank to its real size.

he had possessed marked literary gifts, written a series of papers called “The Recluse of Eagle Range,” enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy.

At that moment she heard Mr. Royall's step as he came up the stairs to bed, and a fierce revulsion of feeling swept over her: Until then she had merely despised him; now deep hatred of him filled her heart. He became to her a horrible old man. . . .

the threat of unwanted sexuality hovers over healthy sexuality tainting it

Of all Mr. Royall had said she had retained only the phrase: “He told Miss Hatchard the books were in bad shape.” What did she care for the other charges against her? Malice or truth, she despised them as she despised her detractors. But that the stranger to whom she had felt herself so mysteriously drawn should have betrayed her!

Among the more reasonable he passed for a harmless creature, a sort of link between the Mountain and civilized folk, who occasionally came down and did a little wood-cutting for a farmer when hands were short.

misled by Harney's interest in the outlaw colony, she had boasted to him of coming from the Mountain? Now every word that had been spoken showed her how such an origin must widen the distance between them.

resulting from Lucius Harney's arrival there ran an undercurrent as mysterious and potent as the influence that makes the forest break into leaf before the ice is off the pools.

Charity glared at her unrelentingly. “You'd oughtn't to have brought it here,” she said, breathing quickly. “I hate other people's clothes—it's just as if they was there themselves.” The two stared at each other again over this avowal, till Charity brought out, in a gasp of anguish: “Oh, go—go—go—or I'll hate you too….”

There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown.

Her child was like a load that held her down, and yet like a hand that pulled her to her feet. She said to herself that she must get up and struggle on.

She herself did not know: she was not sure if she was rejecting what he offered, or already struggling against the temptation of taking what she no longer had a right to. She stood up, shaking and bewildered, and began to speak:

Charity felt herself sinking into deeper depths of weariness, and as they descended through the bare woods there were moments when she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed to be sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer bending over them. But this illusion was faint and transitory. For the most part she had only a confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling as a refuge from the torment of thought.

she had the feeling that if she ceased to keep close to him, and do what he told her to do, the world would slip away from beneath her feet.

rose the memory of Mr. Miles, standing the night before in the desolate house of the Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same dread sound of finality: “I