Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

Zeena, at any rate, did not apply the principle in her own case.

Zenobia's fault–finding was of the silent kind, but not the less penetrating for that.

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

like a married couple,

friendly human intercourse.

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

Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm,

because Ethan "never listened."

only to complain, and to complain of things not in hi...

At other times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far–reaching intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicions and resentments

Ethan was ashamed of the storm of jealousy in his breast.

It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.

Then, with a sudden dart of irony, he wondered if, when their turn came, the same epitaph would be written over him and Zeena.

She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child's. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.

Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well–being.

and he had a confused sense of being in another world,

The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long–established intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so…

But that had been out–of–doors, under the open irresponsible night.

Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.

"I've been in a dream, and this is the only evening we'll ever have together."

To Ethan there was something vaguely ominous in this stolid rejection of free food and warmth, and he wondered what had happened on the drive to nerve Jotham to such stoicism.

Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self–absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.

Now she had mastered him and he abhorred her. Mattie was her relation, not his: there were no means by which he could compel her to keep the girl under her roof. All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. For a moment such a flame of hate rose in him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her. He took a wild step forward and then stopped.

To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena's steady breathing from the bed had assured him that there was to be no sequel to the scene in the kitchen.

He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.

This was the night on which he was to have taken Mattie coasting, and there hung the lamp to light them!

She answered: "It takes two to coax it round the corner"; and submitting to this argument he grasped the other handle, and together they manoeuvred the heavy trunk out to the landing.

and my own troubles…But

went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live. Well, I say it's a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was shocked at me. Only he wasn't with me that morning when she first came to…And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and the way they are now, 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."