Book Two
Summer
XVIII Sylvia
I
Throughout the months of May and June the battle had raged—Lavinia Trench’s battle, not with her family but with herself. She knew, as all those in her little world knew, that a visit to Bromfield was not the difficult thing she had made it. Times without number David had implored her to go with him especially when there was serious illness or death in one or the other of their families. And now that she had achieved her purpose, knowing all the while, somewhere in the depths of her, hope of conquest on a certain perfectly definite object, and had bent her tremendous energy in that direction—knowing all the while, somewhere in the depths of her, that the enemy lay entrenched in quite another quarter.
In those former struggles, in which she had invariably bent David to her will, she had rewarded him with a period of forced sweetness which he was glad to take in lieu of the comradeship he had long since ceased to hope for. It had been this way when they made the perilous move from Olive Hill, where he was doing remarkably well, working at a daily wage, to Springdale, where he must hazard all he had saved ... to give his wife the social advantage she could not find in a dirty mining town. But Lavinia had no instinct for society, derived no immediate satisfaction from such triumphs as had come to her. It appeared to David’s simple and always lucid mind that she created situations for the sheer purpose of annihilating them. In every crisis in their lives, he had owned in retrospect that Lavinia was right. Had he understood the situation, a frank discussion would have won him. It was her method of approach that seemed to him unnecessarily cruel.
She had, from childhood, viewed David Trench as an amiable yokel, to be blindfolded and led about by the hand. And now one sentence in his talk, that morning in the shop, rankled: “Who is it that you want to see in Bromfield?” She had been telling herself over and over again that there was no one in particular she wanted to see. Her essentially prudish mind shrank from the naked truth that stalked before her, in the dark hours of the night, with David peacefully sleeping at her side. But negation was not conquest. In vain she declared to her own soul that Calvin Stone was nothing to her. She could meet him without a tremor. She tried to picture him, old and scarred by life—shrinking from her gaze, because of the stain on his fair name. She saw him, instead, a debonair youth of three-and-twenty, the sort of fellow who would kiss a girl ... and argue about it afterward.