No; he would never understand. His face had once more become blank and benedictory. He pressed her hand, said: “My dear child, I must see you again—we must talk of this!” and passed on, urbane and unperceiving.
Her eyes filled; for a moment her loneliness came down on her like a pall. It was always so whenever she tried to explain, not only to others but even to herself. Yet deep down in her, deeper far than her poor understanding could reach, there was something that said “No” whenever that particular temptation stirred in her. Something that told her that, as Fred Lander’s pity had been the most precious thing he had to give her, so her refusal to accept it, her precipitate flight from it, was the most precious thing she could give him in return. He had overcome his strongest feelings, his most deep-rooted repugnance; he had held out his hand to her, in the extremity of her need, across the whole width of his traditions and his convictions; and she had blessed him for it, and stood fast on her own side. And this afternoon, when she returned home and found his weekly letter—as she was sure she would, since it had not come with that morning’s post—she would bless him again, bless him both for writing the letter, and for giving her the strength to hold out against its pleadings.
Perhaps no one else would ever understand; assuredly he would never understand himself. But there it was. Nothing on earth would ever again help her—help to blot out the old horrors and the new loneliness—as much as the fact of being able to take her stand on that resolve, of being able to say to herself, whenever she began to drift toward new uncertainties and fresh concessions, that once at least she had stood fast, shutting away in a little space of peace and light the best thing that had ever happened to her.
THE END
FOUR PERIOD STORIES OF OLD NEW YORK
A distinct and extremely pleasing innovation is this collection of four new stories by America’s foremost woman fiction writer. Each tells a separate story, but the four cover successive periods in the life of old New York. The society of New York’s earlier days lives again in these four books by
Edith Wharton
FALSE DAWN The ’Forties
The son of an old New York family comes under artistic influences from abroad and acquires tastes and opinions which the New York of the ’Forties can neither understand nor tolerate.
THE OLD MAID The ’Fifties