Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

each time it was a different story.

careless powerful look he had,

sagging pocket.

I guess it's always Ethan done the caring."

"Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters."

Mrs. Ned Hale.

grit.

our intercourse seemed fated to remain as negative and one-sided as if there had been no break in his reserve.

"The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,' a while back," Frome continued,

caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's words, and to see in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body.

now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days, when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic.

"Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?" he asked.

"I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though even the dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by the graves, he thought: "We'll always go on living here together, and some day she'll lie there beside me."

A dead cucumber-vine dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death,

His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.

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

it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts, stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass.

the mention of Zeena had paralysed him.

The cat, profiting by this unusual demonstration, tried to effect an unnoticed retreat, and in doing so backed into the pickle-dish, which fell to the floor with a crash.

People struggled on for years with "troubles," but they almost always succumbed to "complications."

He felt cold and stiff and hungry, and ashamed of being hungry.

He woke up with a touch o' lumbago, and I just made him put on one of old Dr. Kidder's plasters and set right up into the fire."