He answered sharply that he wished to see her, and she’d have to arrange it. A bitter and resentful letter.
She answered with propitiating quickness, and proposed a meeting in the little wood. She brought him a package of sandwiches and some money, kissed him and consoled him and sent him back to New York like a baby pacified with a sugar plum. After that, he came out regularly every Saturday afternoon, and as regularly complained bitterly at the secrecy which appeared to him so unnecessary. But Minnie assured him that it was not, and entreated him to be patient until she had enough money saved to start a new home.
He grew more and more ill; at last she advised him to give up his work.
“I’ll find you a place to board somewhere near,” she said, “and you can rest for a few weeks.”
Under the circumstances, it was extraordinarily difficult to find a place for him where there was no possibility of his hearing of Mr. Petersen and Mr. Petersen’s household. She had to be satisfied with a room in a family of Hungarians who spoke very little English and knew no one outside of their own colony. They lived three miles away, in Sanasset.
The poor fellow was glad enough to rest, glad, too, to get away from the dreadful men’s lodging house in the city. Minnie met him every day and brought him things to eat, which he took back to his clean, lonely little room and consumed with relish. Minnie explained to him that the family where she was housekeeper was very wasteful, very capricious.
“You might just as well have this,” she would say, “Otherwise it would only be thrown away.”
Naturally he was not altogether happy in such an existence, living on his wife’s earnings, taking money from her even for his cigarettes, fed with the munificent scraps from her employer’s table. He had nothing to do, no living soul to speak to, he was ill and growing no better. But he wasn’t anything like so miserable as one might imagine. His feelings were all dull, torpid; he really didn’t think at all. He was forced—literally forced by nature to lie quiescent, to rest.
He was, in a way, beginning to be healed of his terrible moral wounds in this solitude and idleness he so needed. He was not under the influence of anyone now; he was little by little going back to his old traditions.
And then came Minnie’s note; exactly what the familiar phrase calls a “bolt from the blue,” a dazzling and awful blow.