Stoner

by John Williams

Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.

Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.

In the evening they sometimes lighted the oil lamp and read; but more often they sat on folded blankets in front of the fireplace and talked and were silent and watched the flames play intricately upon the logs and watched the play of firelight upon each other’s faces.

“Because in the long run,” Stoner said, “it isn’t Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn’t the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn’t the hardship we would have to go through, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It’s simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we do.” “I know,” Katherine said.

She must have been planning her departure for some time, Stoner realized; and he was grateful that he had not known and that she left him no final note to say what could not be said.

and he found that, after all, he had little to say to her.