Read Edith Wharton - SSC 10 for Free Online Page B

fashion. The
contrast between the soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights,
the oppression of its congested traffic, congested houses, lives, minds and
this veiled sanctuary she called home, always stirred her profoundly. In the
very heart of the hurricane she had found her tiny islet—or thought she had.
And now, in the last months, everything was changed, and she always wavered on
the doorstep and had to force herself to enter.
                 While
she stood there she called up the scene within: the hall hung with old prints,
the ladderlike stairs, and on the left her husband’s long shabby library, full
of books and pipes and worn armchairs inviting to meditation. How she had loved
that room! Then, upstairs, her own drawing-room, in which, since the death of
Kenneth’s first wife, neither furniture nor hangings had been changed, because
there had never been money enough, but which Charlotte had made her own by
moving furniture about and adding more books, another lamp, a table for the new
reviews. Even on the occasion of her only visit to the first Mrs. Ashby—a
distant, self-centred woman, whom she had known very slightly—she had looked
about her with an innocent envy, feeling it to be exactly the drawing-room she
would have liked for herself; and now for more than a year it had been hers to
deal with as she chose—the room to which she hastened back at dusk on winter
days, where she sat reading by the fire, or answering notes at the pleasant
roomy desk, or going over her stepchildren’s copy books, till she heard her
husband’s step.
                 Sometimes
friends dropped in; sometimes—oftener—she was alone; and she liked that best,
since it was another way of being with Kenneth, thinking over what he had said
when they parted in the morning, imagining what he would say when he sprang up
the stairs, found her by herself and caught her to him.
                 Now,
instead of this, she thought of one thing only—the letter she might or might
not find on the hall table. Until she had made sure whether or not it was
there, her mind had no room for anything else. The letter was always the same—a
square grayish envelope with “Kenneth Ashby, Esquire., ”
written on it in bold but faint characters. From the first it had struck
Charlotte as peculiar that anyone who wrote such a firm hand should trace the
letters so lightly; the address was always written as though there were not
enough ink in the pen, or the writer’s wrist were too weak to bear upon it.
Another curious thing was that, in spite of its masculine curves, the writing
was so visibly feminine. Some hands are sexless, some masculine, at first
glance; the writing on the gray envelope, for all its strength and assurance,
was without doubt a woman’s. The envelope never bore anything but the
recipient’s name; no stamp, no address. The letter was presumably delivered by
hand—but by whose? No doubt it was slipped into the letter box, whence the
parlour maid, when she closed the shutters and lit the lights, probably
extracted it. At any rate, it was always in the evening, after dark, that
Charlotte saw it lying there. She thought of the letter in the singular, as
“it”, because, though there had been several since her marriage—seven, to be
exact—they were so alike in appearance that they had become merged in one
another in her mind, become one letter, become “it”.
                 The
first had come the day after their return from their honeymoon—a journey
prolonged to the West Indies, from which they had returned to New York after an
absence of more than two months. Re-entering the house with her husband, late
on that first evening—they had dined at his mother’s—she had seen, alone on the
hall table, the gray envelope. Her eye fell on it before Kenneth’s, and her
first thought was: “Why, I’ve seen that writing before;” but where she could
not recall. The memory was just