Martha hastened to continue.
"I'll come back just as often as I can. And you come and stay with me as much as you can. And in June we'll go to Europe together. Nobody can talk about that! And maybe you'll like it well enough to stay a year or two with me there; lots of people do. And that's the only place really to learn about furnishings and furniture."
Emily lay in her bed that night, ashamed and unhappy. "It's as if I had told her the most enormous and fundamental lie," she reflected. "Nothing good can ever come of this. Strange," she thought, "that I can't remember ever going into Woolworth's with Jim! She remembers something of him that I don't. How old would she have been then? The five-and-ten must have come to town—well—before Bronson came. She loved that store at first, when she was little." She grudged Martha a memory that belonged essentially to her; she thought greedily over every look of his she had ever treasured. She remembered their early love; she recalled still how his dear hands had gone longing, discreetly up inside her stiff cuffs. She remembered his kisses; she remembered how he had come back in the days of his weariness to his mother, and how they had looked across at each other, with that innocent old woman between them. She remembered how he used to sit with little Martha on his knee, in the days of his ill health and bitterness, stroking her hair and looking into her face, trying some way to get close to the mother through the child. She thought of that summer, and of Bronson, and of Jim's irrepressible crying-out to her. She stopped there. She tried always not to think of his death. "He just kissed me," she said, "and went away."
"Oh," she cried to herself, "I'm going to Chicago to-morrow and tell Martha the truth! He was too sweet, too dear. This isn't fair to him. I don't care about Bob; but I won't have her thinking such things of Jim. He was too good for such—baseness. He never forgot I was his brother's wife. He did kiss me, but he went away then. That's the point—he went away. I'll tell her that.
"And if I tell her, she'll never believe me. She thinks I'm sly and sneaking and adulterous now, and if I tell her the truth, she'll think I'm lying to her. She hasn't enough experience yet to believe the truth; she doesn't know enough to believe it. That's why she hates it all so! herself, and passion. All she knows of passion is its roots, in the dark ground; its blossom in the air, its sweet lovely blossom in the sun she hasn't seen. She doesn't know forbearance or tenderness, and that's the best part of it—for us. She wouldn't believe me if I told her what sort of man he was. I don't know what's going to become of her now; she'll never marry now. Probably that way such a lot of women don't marry; the roots of it all look so ugly, so brutal to them. If I could make Martha believe in some one like Jim now! The whole tragedy is that she can't."
When she fell asleep at last, she was thinking still of her lover—not, however, that he went away, but that he kissed her.
Martha hadn't been gone two weeks when that most astonishing news came. Nothing could have stunned the town more than that. The telegram came first to Emily. She heard it over the 'phone.
Mrs. Benton had died suddenly, while motoring in California.
People gathered in groups on the street to discuss it. It seemed a thing that could not be true. To be sure, when you thought it over, you realized that Mrs. Benton was but mortal; but it seemed so unlike her, just to die, to quit, to lay things down. Her body, lifeless, was to be sent home for burial.
Recovering by degrees from the shock of the news; the cruder ones began asking under their breaths what the more sentimental ones had but pondered. Had she lived to hear of the success of the Christmas party? They could not believe that she had. It didn't seem likely.