• THE BLEEDING HEART
never to see him out of his context. She always left the library before
he did so that she would neither be tempted to find out what he was
reading, since this would give a clue to his profession, nor
to
discover
the direction he took to go home. Earlier in the fall, before she was
aware that her library habits coincided with his and before she wanted
to
be
adopted by him, she had enjoyed walking through the woods
and over the hills and beside the river. On Sundays she had always
gone to the largest and the oldest cemetery and there, upon a crest
of rocks which overlooked the thin, ungarnished headstones, she
had thoroughly read the literary supplement of the
New York Times
and had absently considered the hedge of barberry which flourished
every which way beside a brook. She had liked to imagine the fur–
nishings of the houses she could just see opposite and to wonder what
scions of Mayflower families lived in them and were about to order
tea. But now on Sunday, she stayed in her room, long as the day
seemed, for it would in no way serve her purpose, she thought sens–
ibly, to be caught spying on the library-man if he should come some
time to pay his respects to someone's bones, those of his wife, per–
haps, or a beloved daughter dead in early womanhood.
And before this, she had gone to dinner once or twice a week
to an inn a mile out of the town on a byroad. This inn had the mark
of Henry Ford upon it and so had the diners who disputed facts
involved in the American RevolutiQn and who exclaimed over the
hasty-pudding. The landlord, a lethargic gentleman from Bangor, sat
in a chimney comer smoking an authentic pipe and the cook was
said to be descended from King Philip on the maternal side. Rose
did not think it probable that the man in the yellow ascot would
ever come to a place like this since the atmosphere of his own dining
room would be, if anything, even more bona fide. But she did not
wish to run any risk, for, just as she did· not want to know what
books he read (he might be proved by them to
be
in his second
childhood) and did not want to see him laying flowers upon his
daughter's grave (for it might not be a daughter at all but only some
old aunt by marriage) so she did not want to see
him
eating lest she
discover that .he followed an idiosyncratic diet and therefore had a
constitutional disease.
All
this
abstention and the restiveness which accompanied it
made her days and evenings monotonous and she bec'!llle very
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