Fidelity: A Novel

by Susan Glaspell

"Well, I'll go up after while and see her myself," she said, opening the door of her room. "Meanwhile you look after her, please. And oh, Mrs. Hughes," she called back, "I shan't want any dinner. I had a heavy tea at the bazaar," she added hurriedly, and as if resentful of having to make any explanation.

Alone, she took off her hat, pushed back her hair as if it oppressed her, then sank into a low, luxurious chair and, eyes closed, pressed her fingers over her temples as if to command quiet within. But after a moment she impatiently got up and went over to her dressing-table and sat looking into the mirror.

The thing that had started her afternoon wrong was that a friend of her girlhood, whom she had not seen for about thirteen years, had appeared unexpectedly at her table, startling her and then laughing at her confusion. She had not known that Stella Cutting was in town; to be confronted that way with some one out of the past had been unnerving, and then she had been furious with herself for not being able more easily to regain composure. People around her had seen; later she saw them looking at her strangely, covertly interested when she spoke in that sharp way to Mildred Woodbury because she had tossed things about. She had been disturbed, for one thing, at finding Mildred Woodbury at her table.

She was looking in the glass now because Stella Cutting had been one of her bridesmaids. She was not able to put down a miserable desire to try to see just what changes Stella had found.

The dissatisfaction in her face deepened with her scrutiny of it. Doubtless Stella was that very minute talking of how pitifully Marion Averley had changed; how her color used to be clear and even, features firmly molded, eyes bright. She herself remembered how she had looked the night Stella Cutting was her bridesmaid. And now her color was muddy and there were crow's feet about her eyes and deep lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

Stella Cutting looked older herself, very considerably older. But it was a different way of looking older. She had grown stout and her face was too full. But she did not look pulled at like this. As she talked of her children hers was the face of a woman normally, contentedly growing older. The woman sitting before the mirror bitterly turned away now from that reflection of dissatisfaction with emptiness.

It was that boy had done it! she thought with a new rise of resentment. She had been able to go along very evenly until he impertinently came into her house and rudely and stupidly broke through the things she had carefully builded up around herself. Ever since he had plunged into things even she herself had been careful not to break into, there had been this inner turmoil that was giving her the look of an old woman. If Stella Cutting had come just a few months earlier she could not have had so much to say about how terribly Marion Averley had changed.

Why was she so absurd as to let herself be upset? she angrily asked of herself, beginning to unfasten the dress she was wearing that she might get into something loose and try to relax. A hook caught in some lace and in her vexation at not being able at once to unfasten it she gave it a jerk that tore the lace. She bit her lips and could have cried. Those were the things she did these days!—since that boy came and blunderingly broke into guarded places.

She sat in a low, deep chair before the open fire that burned in the sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. It was the room that had been her husband's. After he went away she took it for an upstairs sitting-room—a part of her program of unconcern. As she sank down into the gracious chair she told herself that she would rest for that evening, not think about things. But not to think about things was impossible that night. Stella Cutting had brought old things near and made them newly real: her girlhood, her falling in love with Stuart Williams, her wedding. Those reminiscences caught her and swept her on to other things. She thought of her marriage; thought of things that, ever since that boy came and made her know how insecure she really was in the defences she had put up for herself, it had been a struggle to keep away from.

She had not done much thinking—probing—as to why it was her marriage had failed. That was another one of the things her pride shut her out from. When it failed she turned from it, clothed in pride, never naked before the truth. There was something relaxing in just letting down the barriers, barriers which had recently been so shaken that she was fretted with trying to hold them up.