Edith Wharton - SSC 10 by The World Over (v2.1) Read Free Book Online

definite enough for her to identify the script
whenever it looked up at her faintly from the same pale envelope; but on that
first day she would have thought no more of the letter if, when her husband’s
glance lit on it, she had not chanced to be looking at him. It all happened in
a flash—his seeing the letter, putting out his hand for it, raising it to his
short-sighted eyes to decipher the faint writing, and then abruptly withdrawing
the arm he had slipped through Charlotte’s, and moving away to the hanging
light, his back turned to her. She had waited—waited for a sound, an
exclamation; waited for him to open the letter; but he had slipped it into his
pocket without a word and followed her into the library. And there they had sat
down by the fire and lit their cigarettes, and he had remained silent, his head
thrown back broodingly against the armchair, his eyes fixed on the hearth, and
presently had passed his hand over his forehead and said: “Wasn’t it unusually
hot at my mother’s tonight? I’ve got a splitting head. Mind if I take myself
off to bed?”
                 That
was the first time. Since then Charlotte had never been present when he had
received the letter. It usually came before he got home from his office, and
she had to go upstairs and leave it lying there. But even if she had not seen
it, she would have known it had come by the change in his face when he joined
her—which, on those evenings, he seldom did before they met for dinner.
Evidently, whatever the letter contained, he wanted to be by himself to deal
with it; and when he reappeared he looked years older, looked emptied of life
and courage, and hardly conscious of her presence. Sometimes he was silent for
the rest of the evening; and if he spoke, it was usually to hint some criticism
of her household arrangements, suggest some change in the domestic
administration, to ask, a little nervously, if she didn’t think Joyce’s nursery
governess was rather young and flighty, or if she herself always saw to it that
Peter—whose throat was delicate—was properly wrapped up when he went to school.
At such times Charlotte would remember the friendly warnings she had received
when she became engaged to Kenneth Ashby: “Marrying a heartbroken widower!
Isn’t that rather risky?
                 You
know Elsie Ashby absolutely dominated him”; and how she had jokingly replied:
“He may be glad of a little liberty for a change.” And in this respect she had
been right. She had needed no one to tell her, during the first months, that
her husband was perfectly happy with her. When they came back from their
protracted honeymoon the same friends said: “What have you done to Kenneth? He
looks twenty years younger”; and this time she answered with careless joy: “I
suppose I’ve got him out of his groove.”
                 But
what she noticed after the gray letters began to come was not so much his
nervous tentative faultfinding—which always seemed to be uttered against his
will—as the look in his eyes when he joined her after receiving one of the
letters. The look was not unloving, not even indifferent; it was the look of a
man who had been so far away from ordinary events that when he returns to
familiar things they seem strange. She minded that more than the faultfinding.
                 Though
she had been sure from the first that the handwriting on the gray envelope was
a woman’s, it was long before she associated the mysterious letters with any
sentimental secret. She was too sure of her husband’s love, too confident of
filling his life, for such an idea to occur to her. It seemed far more likely
that the letters—which certainly did not appear to cause him any sentimental
pleasure—were addressed to the busy lawyer than to the private person. Probably
they were from some tiresome client—women, he had often told her, were nearly
always tiresome as clients—who did not want her letters