MihaElla ’s Reviews > At Fault > Status Update

“Then let me tell you something,” and he drew her head down and whispered something in her pink ear that he just brushed with his lips. It made Thérèse laugh and turn very rosy in the moonlight.

Can that be Hosmer? Is this Thérèse? Fie, fie. It is time we were leaving them.”

“They could not yet bring themselves to look at it calmly—this happiness. Even the intoxication of it seemed a thing that promised to hold. Through love they had sought each other, and now the fulfillment of that love had brought more than tenfold its promise to both.

“Thérèse,” Hosmer said finally, “won’t you look at me?
She was looking from the window. She did not turn her head, but her hand went out and met his that was on the seat close beside her. He held it firmly; but soon with an impatient movement drew down the loose wristlet of her glove and clasped his fingers around her warm wrist.

“they grew silent; not from any feeling of the absurdity of such speech between them, for each had but listened to the other’s voice. They became silently absorbed by the consciousness of each other’s nearness. She was looking at his hand that rested on his knee, and thinking it fuller than she remembered it before...

“Who of us has not known the presence of Misery? Perhaps as those fortunate ones whom he has but touched as he passed them by. It may be that we see but a promise of him as we look into the prophetic faces of children; into the eyes of those we love, and the awfulness of life’s possibilities presses into our souls.

“Now might she live again through those summer months with Grégoire—those golden afternoons in the pine woods—whose aroma even now came back to her. She might look again into his loving brown eyes; feel beneath her touch the softness of his curls.

“She was philosophizing a little. Wondering if the world this morning were really the unpleasant place that it appeared, or if these conditions of unpleasantness lay not rather within her own mental vision; a train of thought that might be supposed to have furnished her some degree of entertainment had she continued in its pursuit.

“At one end of the room was a long, low, well-filled book-case. Here had been the direction of Mr. Worthington’s secret and stolen glances the entire evening. And now towards this point he finally transported himself by gradual movements which he believed appeared unstudied and indifferent.

“Those are my acts I’ve been counting,” the girl replied a little gingerly.
“Yo’ ax? I don’ see nuttin’ ’cep’ a piece o’ papah plum fill up wid holes. W’at you call ax?
“Acts—acts. Don’t you know what acts are?
“How you want me know? I neva ben to no school whar you larn all dat.”

“Thérèse relapsed into the gloomy train of reflections that had occupied her since the day she had seen with her bodily eyes something of the wretched life that she had brought upon the man she loved.& yet that wretchedness in its refinement of cruelty & immorality she could not guess & was never to know.Still, she had seen enough to cause her to ask herself with a shudder “was I right—was I right?”