How did one rid one’s self of a shelter? And where would one build again? And what should she build, what could she build, when she did not know what she was? Or wanted to be! To Edwin she was a woman he loved and by so loving prolonged his life. To Jared Barnow she was nothing, perhaps scarcely an acquaintance. Suddenly she remembered her decision. She would do whatever she wanted to do — that was what she had decided. But she must do it quickly before decision faded into old sheltering ways. Now she must do it. She crossed three rooms swiftly and in the dim old library she sat down at her grandfather’s mahogany desk and wrote a brief letter.
Dear Jared Barnow:
I don’t like my house any more. I am tired of it. I want to build a new one. But what? Here is a chance for invention, is it not?
She searched for and found his note with his address. She would mail the letter when she went to luncheon with Amelia Darwent, next door. But at the mailbox, holding the letter in her hand, she changed her mind. What would he think? She put the letter in her purse and snapped it shut.
“But why build another house?” Amelia inquired.
They were at luncheon, the two of them in the oval dining room. Amelia, an only child, continued to live in the great old house on a large corner lot on the Main Line, in the midst of twenty acres of land, which was what remained of three thousand acres, presented to her ancestors in the days of William Penn as a reward for favors now forgotten. She sat, slim and erect, her hair becomingly silvery, in her usual place at the rounded end of the table. Rose, the Irish maid, a desiccated, elderly Rose, served them.
“Because I want to rid myself of old encumbrances,” Edith said.
“You can’t rid yourself of an inheritance,” Amelia persisted. She tasted her clear soup and looked at Rose reproachfully. “It’s not hot!”
“On account, madame, you didn’t come when called,” Rose said truculently.
“Oh, well—”
Amelia lifted her bouillon cup and drank the soup as though it were coffee.
“What’s next?” she inquired.
“Broiled squab, like you said, madame,” Rose replied.
“Put it on the table,” Amelia ordered. “Serve the salad, and leave us.”
“Yes, madame.”
Alone with Amelia, she unfolded her plan of a house, a place not yet clear in her own mind.
“I met a young man—”
“Aha,” Amelia said triumphantly. “I thought so! You look ten years younger. There’s nothing so absolutely cosmetic for a woman as a young man, or so I am told.”
“Amelia, you are repulsive,” she said severely.
“My dear, when were we not honest with each other?” Amelia demanded. “You are looking unnaturally beautiful — and have — ever since you returned from Vermont.”
“Amelia, will you stop?”
“Don’t pretend then, Edie!”
The two women looked at one another over the low silver bowl filled with small pink hothouse roses. Amelia’s black eyes were laughing and Edith turned her own blue eyes away.
“I don’t know why I tolerate you, Amelia Darwent.”
“Because you know I never tell anyone what you tell me, Edith Chardman!”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Edith said. She put out her hand and touched a rose. “I can’t see why your roses are always better than mine.”
“Bone meal,” Amelia said. “So what has the young man to do with the house?”
“Nothing,” Edith said. She helped herself to a squab.
“Nothing,” Amelia repeated.
“Except I’ll ask him for suggestions,” she amended. “But that’s nothing.”
“Then let’s not talk about him,” Amelia retorted. “Let’s talk about you. You’re someone to talk about! My dear, how shall you amuse yourself?”
“By building the house, of course.”
“But where?”
“Somewhere — by the sea.”
She was improvising as she went. She had not thought of a house by the sea, but the moment she spoke the words, she knew that of course it was what she had wanted for years. She had even spoken of it to Arnold once, long ago, but he had refused the idea.
“That surf, pounding all night! We’d not be able to sleep.”
“You’d not be able to sleep,” she had retorted. “I’d be lulled.”
“You can sleep anywhere,” he said with one of his wry smiles, never unkind and yet edged. He was always the superior mate, an attitude that she attributed to the combination of English and German elements in the ancestry, dating from the marriage of an early English great-grandfather with a German Mädchen. Environment had encouraged these ancestral traits. He had not even been overly impressed by her Phi Beta Kappa key, won in her senior year at Radcliffe. It would take time for her to recover from the atmospheric pressure of her marriage.
As if she had divined these thoughts, Amelia now spoke.
“Do you know, I am quite curious about you, Edith.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Arnold kept such a strict hand.” Amelia was vigorously salting and peppering her salad. “I shall be watching you, lovingly, of course, for I am very fond of you, to see just how you will blossom. For I don’t doubt you’ll blossom, my dear, with the charming looks you have. There are young men who actually prefer women over forty. Oh, yes, there are — don’t look so surprised!”
“Do I look surprised?” she inquired.
“Shocked, perhaps,” Amelia said. For an instant she pondered whether to confide in Amelia, that old friend, the astounding news of her unexpected new relationship with Edwin. Immediately she decided against it. She had never been given to confidences and, moreover, she was certain that Amelia would not be able to comprehend the quality of the relationship. Amelia would laugh, or Amelia would make ribald comments about lecherous old men, comments that would indeed apply, doubtless, to most old men, but not to a man as intelligent, as learned, as wise, as Edwin Steadley. To Amelia love was sex, whatever others might call it. Instead of confidence she replied with mild evasion.
“I am not aware of any great changes about to take place in me.”
A monstrous lie she realized as soon as she had spoken, for it remained incredible that she had accepted Edwin, had actually allowed him in her bed, thereby in that simple act asserting independence of the past years during which she had known intimately no man except her husband. And it was not to be explained to anyone, even to herself, why the intimacy with Edwin, at once fulfilled and unfulfilled, was no infidelity to Arnold, living or dead.
“Each experience of love,” Edwin had said one night in the darkness, “is a life in itself. Each has nothing to do with what has taken place before or will take place again. Love is born, it pursues its separate way, world without end, transmuted into life energy.”
“I doubt I shall ever love anyone else,” she had replied in the darkness. At that moment she had deeply loved the beautiful old man. Never had she known such a mind as his, crystalline in purity. That was the amazing quality. Even when he held her against him, the quality was not changed. She had loved Arnold, too, but he was divided, the one man intelligent, though not creatively so, a decisive, calculating self-confident man whom she admired and trusted, and the other a silent, possessively passionate man, who appeared regularly and without preliminaries in her bedroom to fulfill his primary need. She could not imagine talking in the night with Arnold about life and death and what communication might be possible between them. Arnold took it for granted that death was total end.
“I see a change in you already,” Amelia now declared, dipping her fingers in a Venetian glass finger bowl.
“Tell me what you see.”
Thus encouraged, Amelia lit a long taper-thin cigar and proceeded. “Well, you are less restrained, more unconscious of yourself, even in the way you walk.”