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

opened by his secretary
and therefore had them carried to his house. Yes; but in that case the unknown
female must be unusually troublesome, judging from the effect her letters
produced. Then again, though his professional discretion was exemplary, it was
odd that he had never uttered an impatient comment, never remarked to
Charlotte, in a moment of expansion, that there was a nuisance of a woman who
kept badgering him about a case that had gone against her. He had made more
than one semi-confidence of the kind—of course without giving names or details;
but concerning this mysterious correspondent his lips were sealed.
                 There
was another possibility: what is euphemistically called an “old entanglement”.
Charlotte Ashby was a sophisticated woman. She had few illusions about the
intricacies of the human heart; she knew that there were often old
entanglements. But when she had married Kenneth Ashby, her friends, instead of
hinting at such a possibility, had said: “You’ve got your work cut out for you.
Marrying a Don Juan is a sinecure to it. Kenneth’s never looked at another
woman since he first saw Elsie Corder. During all the years of their marriage
he was more like an unhappy lover than a comfortably contented husband. He’ll
never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp; and whatever you
venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your
place.”
                 Except
for an occasional nervous mistrust as to her ability to manage the children—a
mistrust gradually dispelled by her good humour and the children’s obvious
fondness for her—none of these forebodings had come true. The desolate widower,
of whom his nearest friends said that only his absorbing professional interests
had kept him from suicide after his first wife’s death, had fallen in love, two
years later, with Charlotte Gorse, and after an impetuous wooing had married
her and carried her off on a tropical honeymoon. And ever
since he had been as tender and loverlike as during those first radiant weeks. Before asking her to marry him he had spoken to her frankly of his great love
for his first wife and his despair after her sudden death; but even then he had
assumed no stricken attitude, or implied that life offered no possibility of
renewal. He had been perfectly simple and natural, and had confessed to
Charlotte that from the beginning he had hoped the future held new gifts for
him. And when, after their marriage, they returned to the house where his
twelve years with his first wife had been spent, he had told Charlotte at once
that he was sorry he couldn’t afford to do the place over for her, but that he
knew every woman had her own views about furniture and all sorts of household
arrangements a man would never notice, and had begged her to make any changes
she saw fit without bothering to consult him. As a result, she made as few as
possible; but his way of beginning their new life in the old setting was so
frank and unembarrassed that it put her immediately at her ease, and she was
almost sorry to find that the portrait of Elsie Ashby, which used to hang over
the desk in his library, had been transferred in their absence to the children’s
nursery. Knowing herself to be the indirect cause of this banishment, she spoke
of it to her husband; but he answered: “Oh, I thought they ought to grow up
with her looking down on them.” The answer moved Charlotte, and satisfied her;
and as time went by she had to confess that she felt more at home in her house,
more at ease and in confidence with her husband, since that long coldly
beautiful face on the library wall no longer followed her with guarded eyes. It
was as if Kenneth’s love had penetrated to the secret she hardly acknowledged
to her own heart—her passionate need to feel herself the sovereign even of his
past.
                 With
all this stored-up happiness to sustain her, it was curious that