There was no need for shame or even embarrassment in this, a situation severely common enough, she reflected, when a wife lost her husband or a woman her lover. She had simply to face life as it was now and make her choices. She had chosen to live alone and explore her freedom. Therefore she must turn her mind, her imagination, away from Jared as a male. Let her put it as frankly as that, let her think of him as a human being, a friend and no more. Thus she admonished herself. Think no more of how he looks, she decided sternly; think instead of his mind, his interests, his career, all the aspects of his strong personality. There was no reason why she should not enjoy these, in freedom, instead of allowing an emotion to seize control of herself.
I shall prepare myself to be his friend, she thought, and remembering his admiration for her father, she slipped back into the days when she had been her father’s daughter, the only one in his house who understood what he was talking about when he spoke of his work with cosmic rays, the only one who wanted to understand. And she had wanted to understand because she loved him and knew that, successful scientist that he was and famous everywhere in the world, he was lonely in his own house.
“Your mother is a darling good woman,” he used to say to her, “and I’ve been a poor sort of husband, to her, my mind always somewhere else, even when she’s talking to me. It’s no wonder she loses patience with me. I don’t blame her a bit.”
Her answer to this had been silence, then throwing her arms about him, then finally an endless patience with Arnold when he wanted to talk with her, though his work as a lawyer was monotonously dull, she thought, yet if she felt impatient, and she had, very often, she had only to remember her lonely father, and, yes, her impatient, lonely mother, filling her days with household detail, and her own impatience died. Yes, her father was lonely as only scientists can be lonely, working as they do and must with the vast concerns of the universe.
It occurred to her now that Jared, too, must be lonely, young though he was, but so much more brilliant than his fellows and living alone, too, with an old uncle. She could easily mend that loneliness and without thinking of it as a love affair, which indeed was the last experience she wanted. Once during her marriage she had been strongly attracted to a handsome man of her own age, a bitter time it had been, she hated the very memory of it, for the attraction had been purely physical, and she was thankful for that, for if she had been able to respect the man, she could not have resisted him. She had resisted, but she remembered and would always remember the frightening power of her own impulses, compelling her to yield herself until the impulse, resisted, became an actual pain, so intolerable that she had begged Arnold to take her to Europe that summer. Whether he knew why she had been so importunate she never knew and did not want to know even now. He had listened to her pleading, and had not asked why she was weeping while she talked, nor could she tell him why.
“Of course, my dear,” he said. “I shall enjoy a vacation myself. There now — you’re in a state of nerves — I’ve noticed it lately. You do too much — so many charities and so on and the children are at a trying age. I don’t at all like the way Millicent answers you when you speak to her.”
Millicent! That daughter of hers, now a complacent wife and mother, had she known why her mother had been so impatient and abstracted in those days? Had she perhaps ever seen them together, her mother and the extravagantly handsome man with blue eyes and dark hair silvered at the temples — a thin, aggressive, sharply pretty adolescent Millicent, critical with love for her father and jealous of her mother—
She put away such memories and thought of Jared in other terms. She would learn to know his mind, his thought, and in such ways assuage his loneliness, and her own need.
…“But you’re looking so well,” her daughter exclaimed.
“Should I not?” she inquired.
Millicent herself did not look well, she thought. The young woman had let herself gain weight, and her hair, dark as Arnold's had been, looked unbrushed, even unwashed, and she wore a dull blue suit that needed pressing.
“But you’re rejuvenated,” Millicent insisted so accusingly that her mother laughed.
“And is that sinful?”
They were in her upstairs sitting room, and here Millicent had found her not fifteen minutes ago. But it was her daughter’s habit to let months pass without communication and then drop in upon her without warning.
“No,” Millicent said reluctantly. “Not exactly,” she added. She glanced at the papers on the desk where her mother sat, leaning forward and craning her neck to do so. “What are you drawing?”
“Plans for an imaginary house,” she replied.
“House — that’s what I’ve come about,” Millicent exclaimed. “Your looking so blooming put me off. Tom wants a week’s deer hunting in Vermont and I thought I’d go along with the children if you can lend us the house.”
“Of course,” she said. Then moved by a sudden and inexplicable impulse, she continued, “As a matter of fact, I’ll give you the house, if you like.”
“Why?” Millicent asked bluntly.
She hesitated. “I don’t know exactly — except it’s too lonely there for me.”
“I can understand that,” Millicent said. “There’s no one in the world who could take Father’s place.”
“No. Nor would I wish it otherwise.”
“Of course not.”
They exchanged looks, hers smiling and a little sad, Millicent’s almost curious. Then her daughter rose and, approaching, stooped to kiss her cheek. “I can’t stay, Mother.”
“You need a new suit,” Edith said gently.
“Do I? Well, I won’t get one! Tom’s thinking of a new job. We’d have to move to San Francisco, though.”
“Oh — so far?”
“It is far, but what can I do?”
“Go with him, of course — what else? But when?”
“That’s the question. Tom said not to tell you until it’s certain. But it slipped out.”
“I’ll keep it to myself. And what’s distance nowadays? Or time?”
“True! Well, good-bye, Mother. Of course I’ll see you before we go, if we go!”
They clasped hands and she clung to her daughter's hand.
“And if it’s to be, when would it be?”
“We count on the end of the month, in time for Christmas in the new place.”
Her daughter was gone, and she was alone again. Christmas? It meant then that the house would be empty. Tony’s wife wanted their children to have Christmas in their own home. Arnold’s death meant one change after another in her life. This old house remained as it was but everything in it was changed. It had really been his house, then! At least without him all its ways and habits were meaningless. If she continued to live here, she would live in a growing melancholy that in the end would stifle her. She took the receiver from the telephone desk.
“Is this the Wilton Real Estate office? Yes? Then may I speak to Robert Wilton, Senior? A few minutes? I’ll wait—”
She waited until a hearty voice resounded at her ear.
“Yes, Mrs. Chardman! What can I do for you? Do you want to sell your house? I could make a fine sale for you if you—”
“Not yet, thanks! On the contrary, I want to buy.”
“Well, now! You’re moving?”
“There’s a piece of land I want to own. Perhaps I’ll put up a house of sorts, just for myself. It’s by the sea—”
“Understandable, entirely understandable — a place by the sea. I seem to remember you always hankered — but I think Mr. Chardman didn’t quite — still and all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have what you want now.”
“None at all,” she agreed.