“Shall you live there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, giving him a frowning, startled look, as if he had surprised her at a disadvantage. She added: “Enoch took me through it yesterday. The room where he was born,—that will be mine. The room where his father died is just as it was then. He thinks we shouldn’t touch it.”
She shivered. He asked her if she was cold. She wasn’t, but on the next turn past the door she turned and they went in.
Enoch’s idea of marriage was inherited. You take a wife from the church to the ancestral abode and become jointly responsible with God for her past, present, future and hereafter, for her body, her mind, her way with the neighbors, for everything about her save the separate flame of her individuality. That is vanity. The house is yours, therefore she must accept it. It was yours before she had any rights in it, therefore she must get used to it, as she must get used to you. And why not? If Aaron married would he not take his wife to the Woolwine Mansion just as it was? Well, what was Aaron’s was like Aaron and what was Enoch’s was like Enoch, and what a woman married was what she got.
Enoch rode home with Esther that night in her father’s carriage. Mitchell had gone home earlier and sent the carriage back. As they were passing the iron-stone house—fatally then—Enoch asked:
“What do you and Aaron find to talk about?”
“Nothing,” she said.
That was literally the truth. It was with extreme difficulty that they found anything to say to each other. Never had they carried on an intimate, self-revealing conversation. There was too much constraint on both sides. But Enoch could hardly believe that Aaron was under any circumstances inarticulate, like himself. Or was it that he knew instinctively if what Esther said was true there lay in that very truth a deep significance?
Her answer made him seethingly angry. An ungovernable feeling rose up in him spirally. It was as an adder stinging him in the dark. He could not seize it, for he knew not what or where it was. He could not escape from it. The pain was horrible.
Esther knew nothing of these violent emotions. She had no more intuition of him than he had of her. That sense by which natures attuned exchange thoughts without words was impossible between them. Between Esther and Aaron it already existed: it always had. But it was unacknowledged.