Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

"Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away."

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story.

His father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

as he stood outside the church, and saw Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain....

"That's so. It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across the threshold of their room.

Though she was but seven years her husband's senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already an old woman.

He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter...

"It's all right, Matt. Come back and finish supper," he commanded her. Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her. She did not even ask what he had done. Except when he was steering a big log down the mountain to his mill he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery.

When the door of her room had closed on her he remembered that he had not even touched her hand.

Mattie came forward carrying a plate of doughnuts. She and Ethan looked at each other in silence; then she said, as she had said the night before: "I guess it's about time for supper."

"You're a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It's the way your father begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn't get at 'em—and now you've took from me the one I cared for most of all—"

There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.

I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."