A good woman

A GOOD WOMAN

BY LOUIS BROMFIELD Author of “The Green Bay Tree,” “Possession,” and “Early Autumn”
NEW YORK :: FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY :: MCMXXVII Copyright, 1927, by Frederick A. Stokes Company All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America To THE LATE STUART P. SHERMAN TAKEN BY DEATH AT THE MOMENT WHEN THE AMERICAN WRITING TO WHICH HE GAVE HIMSELF WITH SO MUCH DEVOTION, NEEDED HIM MOST SORELY.
“A Good Woman” is the last of a series of four novels dealing from various angles with a strongly marked phase of American life. The book was planned, without being in any sense a sequel, as part of a picture which includes three other sections—“The Green Bay Tree,” “Possession” and “Early Autumn.” Taken together the four might be considered as a single novel with the all-encompassing title “Escape.”
Louis Bromfield.
Paris , June 15, 1927.



She found the letter when she returned to the slate-colored house from the regular monthly meeting of the Augusta Simpson Branch of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. It was eleven o’clock at night and this letter lay, like any quite ordinary and usual letter, on the dining-room table in the dim radiance of gaslight turned economically low in the dome hand-painted in a design of wild-roses. Her first thought as she took off her sealskin tippet was that it must have arrived by the last post, which came at four, and so could have been in her hands seven hours earlier if the slattern Essie had not forgotten to give it to her. But what, she reflected as she removed her hat and jacket, could you expect of a girl of unknown parentage taken from the county poor farm to help around the house in return for her clothing, her board and two dollars a month pocket money? What could you expect from a girl who was boy-crazy? How was such a creature to understand what a letter from Philip meant to her? What could a slut like Essie know of a mother’s feelings for her only son?
She knew it was from Philip by the round, boyish handwriting and by the outlandish stamp of Zanzibar. (It would be another for the collection of her brother Elmer.)