514
PARTISAN REVIEW
because I was so far ahead of all the other girls. But I think that there
are other reasons for a girl's going away to school." "Yes, of course there
are," I assented-! found myself siding against her grandfather. "I wish
you would tell Grandfather that," she said in her sedate way. She evi–
dently assumed I was a friend of her family, or was it merely that we
had somehow established a sympathetic understanding? "I will if the
occasion presents itself," I found myself replying. "Oh, please do! won't
you?- It might help,"-she became for a moment quite girlish; then
returned to her judicious tone: "Of course, if anything happened to
Mother, I'd have to stay here with Grandfather. I shouldn't he justified
.
.
''
m gomg away.
We had reached the front steps, and I said goodby. She invited me
to come again in her most mature manner and hoped, with a twitch of her
bang, that her mother would soon be back. I hoped-getting the name
right with an effort, as
if
I were obliged to struggle with some false con·
ception that bulked in my mind without my heing able to see it-1 hoped
that Miss Terhune would soon be better. The effect of this on the girl was
baffling for a moment and yet gave me a queer sort of qualm as if I knew
I had committed an indiscretion. She suddenly seemed embarrassed, but
she handled it with her usual self-possession: "Oh, I'm not really sick.
Mother worries about me, but Grandfather says it's not important. It's
silly, of course, to have fainting-fits, but I'm not really sick at all!" I saw
that she had taken my remark to herself: she must be some S()ft of niece
of Ellen's father. "Well, I hope," I said, "that everybody's better."
As I left her alone on the steps, with the darkened house behind her,
in that countryside of deserted residences, the colors of the trees fading
in the day-end and the thickening mist, I was visited by a doubt, a pang,
by a feeling almost dolorous that lingered, as if I almost knew something
about her which I could not remember to have learned, as if I wanted to
save her from something. Though I had never quite recognized the fact
in the past, I could see now that that house was an unhappy one. I thought
of the girl mounting. the steps, passing the chairs in which nobody sat,
swinging open the large front door with its panelling of varnished oak
and its upper and lower parts that were separate-going back into that
lampless interior, so full of an American past which seemed to me even
at its best so cluttered, middle-class and banal. I had left the place so
quiet and dark that it seemed to me even improbable that anyone would
come to ring the gongs and summon her in to dinner.
III.
When the summer people in a place like Hecate County go away after
the first of September, the people who stay on through the winter are
more thrown in on themselves and on each other. New contours of the
community emerge; one distinguishes a new scale of values. One gradu–
ally becomes interested in neighbors whom it had not occurred to one to
