At the kitchen door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a big-boned
grey who pawed the snow and swung his long head restlessly from side to
side.

Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by the stove. Her head
was wrapped in her shawl, and she was reading a book called "Kidney
Troubles and Their Cure" on which he had had to pay extra postage only a
few days before.

Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and after a moment he
asked: "Where's Mattie?"

Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied: "I presume she's
getting down her trunk."

The blood rushed to his face. "Getting down her trunk--alone?"

"Jotham Powell's down in the wood-lot, and Dan'l Byrne says he darsn't
leave that horse," she returned.

Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the phrase, had left
the kitchen and sprung up the stairs. The door of Mattie's room was
shut, and he wavered a moment on the landing. "Matt," he said in a low
voice; but there was no answer, and he put his hand on the door-knob.

He had never been in her room except once, in the early summer, when
he had gone there to plaster up a leak in the eaves, but he remembered
exactly how everything had looked: the red-and-white quilt on her narrow
bed, the pretty pin-cushion on the chest of drawers, and over it the
enlarged photograph of her mother, in an oxydized frame, with a bunch of
dyed grasses at the back. Now these and all other tokens of her presence
had vanished, and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena
had shown her into it on the day of her arrival. In the middle of the
floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress,
her back turned to the door and her face in her hands. She had not heard
Ethan's call because she was sobbing and she did not hear his step till
he stood close behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders.

"Matt--oh, don't--oh, Matt!"

She started up, lifting her wet face to his. "Ethan--I thought I wasn't
ever going to see you again!"

He took her in his arms, pressing her close, and with a trembling hand
smoothed away the hair from her forehead.

"Not see me again? What do you mean?"

She sobbed out: "Jotham said you told him we wasn't to wait dinner for
you, and I thought--"

"You thought I meant to cut it?" he finished for her grimly.

She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair,
which was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had
the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.

Through the door they heard Zeena's voice calling out from below: "Dan'l
Byrne says you better hurry up if you want him to take that trunk."

They drew apart with stricken faces. Words of resistance rushed to
Ethan's lips and died there. Mattie found her handkerchief and dried her
eyes; then, bending down, she took hold of a handle of the trunk.

Ethan put her aside. "You let go, Matt," he ordered her.

She answered: "It takes two to coax it round the corner"; and submitting
to this argument he grasped the other handle, and together they
manoeuvred the heavy trunk out to the landing.

"Now let go," he repeated; then he shouldered the trunk and carried it
down the stairs and across the passage to the kitchen. Zeena, who had
gone back to her seat by the stove, did not lift her head from her book
as he passed. Mattie followed him out of the door and helped him to lift
the trunk into the back of the sleigh. When it was in place they stood
side by side on the door-step, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind
his fidgety horse.

It seemed to Ethan that his heart was bound with cords which an unseen
hand was tightening with every tick of the clock. Twice he opened his
lips to speak to Mattie and found no breath. At length, as she turned to
re-enter the house, he laid a detaining hand on her.

"I'm going to drive you over, Matt," he whispered.

She murmured back: "I think Zeena wants I should go with Jotham."

"I'm going to drive you over," he repeated; and she went into the
kitchen without answering.

At dinner Ethan could not eat. If he lifted his eyes they rested on
Zeena's pinched face, and the corners of her straight lips seemed to
quiver away into a smile. She ate well, declaring that the mild weather
made her feel better, and pressed a second helping of beans on Jotham
Powell, whose wants she generally ignored.

Mattie, when the meal was over, went about her usual task of clearing
the table and washing up the dishes. Zeena, after feeding the cat,
had returned to her rocking-chair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who
always lingered last, reluctantly pushed back his chair and moved toward
the door.

On the threshold he turned back to say to Ethan: "What time'll I come
round for Mattie?"

Ethan was standing near the window, mechanically filling his pipe while
he watched Mattie move to and fro. He answered: "You needn't come round;
I'm going to drive her over myself."

He saw the rise of the colour in Mattie's averted cheek, and the quick
lifting of Zeena's head.

"I want you should stay here this afternoon, Ethan," his wife said.
"Jotham can drive Mattie over."

Mattie flung an imploring glance at him, but he repeated curtly: "I'm
going to drive her over myself."

Zeena continued in the same even tone: "I wanted you should stay and fix
up that stove in Mattie's room afore the girl gets here. It ain't been
drawing right for nigh on a month now."

Ethan's voice rose indignantly. "If it was good enough for Mattie I
guess it's good enough for a hired girl."

"That girl that's coming told me she was used to a house where they had
a furnace," Zeena persisted with the same monotonous mildness.

"She'd better ha' stayed there then," he flung back at her; and turning
to Mattie he added in a hard voice: "You be ready by three, Matt; I've
got business at Corbury."

Jotham Powell had started for the barn, and Ethan strode down after him
aflame with anger. The pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in
his eyes. He went about his task without knowing what force directed
him, or whose hands and feet were fulfilling its orders. It was not till
he led out the sorrel and backed him between the shafts of the sleigh
that he once more became conscious of what he was doing. As he passed
the bridle over the horse's head, and wound the traces around the
shafts, he remembered the day when he had made the same preparations
in order to drive over and meet his wife's cousin at the Flats. It
was little more than a year ago, on just such a soft afternoon, with a
"feel" of spring in the air. The sorrel, turning the same big ringed eye
on him, nuzzled the palm of his hand in the same way; and one by one all
the days between rose up and stood before him...

He flung the bearskin into the sleigh, climbed to the seat, and drove up
to the house. When he entered the kitchen it was empty, but Mattie's bag
and shawl lay ready by the door. He went to the foot of the stairs and
listened. No sound reached him from above, but presently he thought he
heard some one moving about in his deserted study, and pushing open the
door he saw Mattie, in her hat and jacket, standing with her back to him
near the table.

She started at his approach and turning quickly, said: "Is it time?"

"What are you doing here, Matt?" he asked her.

She looked at him timidly. "I was just taking a look round--that's all,"
she answered, with a wavering smile.

They went back into the kitchen without speaking, and Ethan picked up
her bag and shawl.

"Where's Zeena?" he asked.

"She went upstairs right after dinner. She said she had those shooting
pains again, and didn't want to be disturbed."

"Didn't she say good-bye to you?"

"No. That was all she said."

Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder
that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone. Then the sense
of unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to
believe that Mattie stood there for the last time before him.

"Come on," he said almost gaily, opening the door and putting her bag
into the sleigh. He sprang to his seat and bent over to tuck the rug
about her as she slipped into the place at his side. "Now then, go
'long," he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly
jogging down the hill.

"We got lots of time for a good ride, Matt!" he cried, seeking her hand
beneath the fur and pressing it in his. His face tingled and he felt
dizzy, as if he had stopped in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day
for a drink.

At the gate, instead of making for Starkfield, he turned the sorrel to
the right, up the Bettsbridge road. Mattie sat silent, giving no sign
of surprise; but after a moment she said: "Are you going round by Shadow
Pond?"

He laughed and answered: "I knew you'd know!"

She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his
coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown
wave of hair. They drove slowly up the road between fields glistening
under the pale sun, and then bent to the right down a lane edged with
spruce and larch. Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills
stained by mottlings of black forest flowed away in round white curves
against the sky. The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening
in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow. As they
entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the
branches with the dropping needles. Here the snow was so pure that the
tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns,
and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of
bronze.

Ethan drove on in silence till they reached a part of the wood where the
pines were more widely spaced; then he drew up and helped Mattie to get
out of the sleigh. They passed between the aromatic trunks, the snow
breaking crisply under their feet, till they came to a small sheet
of water with steep wooded sides. Across its frozen surface, from the
farther bank, a single hill rising against the western sun threw the
long conical shadow which gave the lake its name. It was a shy secret
spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his heart.

He looked up and down the little pebbly beach till his eye lit on a
fallen tree-trunk half submerged in snow.

"There's where we sat at the picnic," he reminded her.

The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had
taken part in together: a "church picnic" which, on a long afternoon of
the preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merry-making.
Mattie had begged him to go with her but he had refused. Then, toward
sunset, coming down from the mountain where he had been felling timber,
he had been caught by some strayed revellers and drawn into the group by
the lake, where Mattie, encircled by facetious youths, and bright as
a blackberry under her spreading hat, was brewing coffee over a gipsy
fire. He remembered the shyness he had felt at approaching her in his
uncouth clothes, and then the lighting up of her face, and the way she
had broken through the group to come to him with a cup in her hand. They
had sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and she had
missed her gold locket, and set the young men searching for it; and it
was Ethan who had spied it in the moss.... That was all; but all their
intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when
they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a
butterfly in the winter woods...

"It was right there I found your locket," he said, pushing his foot into
a dense tuft of blueberry bushes.

"I never saw anybody with such sharp eyes!" she answered.

She sat down on the tree-trunk in the sun and he sat down beside her.

"You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat," he said.

She laughed with pleasure. "Oh, I guess it was the hat!" she rejoined.

They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for
a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he
meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and
to tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say
such things.

Suddenly she rose to her feet and said: "We mustn't stay here any
longer."

He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only half-roused from his dream.
"There's plenty of time," he answered.

They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were straining
to absorb and hold fast the other's image. There were things he had to
say to her before they parted, but he could not say them in that place
of summer memories, and he turned and followed her in silence to
the sleigh. As they drove away the sun sank behind the hill and the
pine-boles turned from red to grey.

By a devious track between the fields they wound back to the Starkfield
road. Under the open sky the light was still clear, with a reflection of
cold red on the eastern hills. The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to
draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their
wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more
alone.

As they turned into the Starkfield road Ethan said: "Matt, what do you
mean to do?"

She did not answer at once, but at length she said: "I'll try to get a
place in a store."

"You know you can't do it. The bad air and the standing all day nearly
killed you before."

"I'm a lot stronger than I was before I came to Starkfield."

"And now you're going to throw away all the good it's done you!"

There seemed to be no answer to this, and again they drove on for a
while without speaking. With every yard of the way some spot where they
had stood, and laughed together or been silent, clutched at Ethan and
dragged him back.

"Isn't there any of your father's folks could help you?"

"There isn't any of 'em I'd ask."

He lowered his voice to say: "You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for
you if I could."

"I know there isn't."

"But I can't--"

She was silent, but he felt a slight tremor in the shoulder against his.

"Oh, Matt," he broke out, "if I could ha' gone with you now I'd ha' done
it--"

She turned to him, pulling a scrap of paper from her breast. "Ethan--I
found this," she stammered. Even in the failing light he saw it was the
letter to his wife that he had begun the night before and forgotten
to destroy. Through his astonishment there ran a fierce thrill of joy.
"Matt--" he cried; "if I could ha' done it, would you?"

"Oh, Ethan, Ethan--what's the use?" With a sudden movement she tore the
letter in shreds and sent them fluttering off into the snow.

"Tell me, Matt! Tell me!" he adjured her.

She was silent for a moment; then she said, in such a low tone that he
had to stoop his head to hear her: "I used to think of it sometimes,
summer nights when the moon was so bright. I couldn't sleep."

His heart reeled with the sweetness of it. "As long ago as that?"

She answered, as if the date had long been fixed for her: "The first
time was at Shadow Pond."

"Was that why you gave me my coffee before the others?"

"I don't know. Did I? I was dreadfully put out when you wouldn't go to
the picnic with me; and then, when I saw you coming down the road, I
thought maybe you'd gone home that way o' purpose; and that made me
glad."

They were silent again. They had reached the point where the road
dipped to the hollow by Ethan's mill and as they descended the darkness
descended with them, dropping down like a black veil from the heavy
hemlock boughs.

"I'm tied hand and foot, Matt. There isn't a thing I can do," he began
again.

"You must write to me sometimes, Ethan."

"Oh, what good'll writing do? I want to put my hand out and touch you. I
want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick
and when you're lonesome."

"You mustn't think but what I'll do all right."

"You won't need me, you mean? I suppose you'll marry!"

"Oh, Ethan!" she cried.

"I don't know how it is you make me feel, Matt. I'd a'most rather have
you dead than that!"

"Oh, I wish I was, I wish I was!" she sobbed.

The sound of her weeping shook him out of his dark anger, and he felt
ashamed.

"Don't let's talk that way," he whispered.

"Why shouldn't we, when it's true? I've been wishing it every minute of
the day."

"Matt! You be quiet! Don't you say it."

"There's never anybody been good to me but you."

"Don't say that either, when I can't lift a hand for you!"

"Yes; but it's true just the same."

They had reached the top of School House Hill and Starkfield lay below
them in the twilight. A cutter, mounting the road from the village,
passed them by in a joyous flutter of bells, and they straightened
themselves and looked ahead with rigid faces. Along the main street
lights had begun to shine from the house-fronts and stray figures were
turning in here and there at the gates. Ethan, with a touch of his whip,
roused the sorrel to a languid trot.

As they drew near the end of the village the cries of children reached
them, and they saw a knot of boys, with sleds behind them, scattering
across the open space before the church.

"I guess this'll be their last coast for a day or two," Ethan said,
looking up at the mild sky.

Mattie was silent, and he added: "We were to have gone down last night."

Still she did not speak and, prompted by an obscure desire to
help himself and her through their miserable last hour, he went on
discursively: "Ain't it funny we haven't been down together but just
that once last winter?"

She answered: "It wasn't often I got down to the village."

"That's so," he said.

They had reached the crest of the Corbury road, and between the
indistinct white glimmer of the church and the black curtain of the
Varnum spruces the slope stretched away below them without a sled on its
length. Some erratic impulse prompted Ethan to say: "How'd you like me
to take you down now?"

She forced a laugh. "Why, there isn't time!"

"There's all the time we want. Come along!" His one desire now was to
postpone the moment of turning the sorrel toward the Flats.

"But the girl," she faltered. "The girl'll be waiting at the station."

"Well, let her wait. You'd have to if she didn't. Come!"

The note of authority in his voice seemed to subdue her, and when he
had jumped from the sleigh she let him help her out, saying only, with a
vague feint of reluctance: "But there isn't a sled round anywheres."

"Yes, there is! Right over there under the spruces." He threw the
bearskin over the sorrel, who stood passively by the roadside, hanging
a meditative head. Then he caught Mattie's hand and drew her after him
toward the sled.

She seated herself obediently and he took his place behind her, so close
that her hair brushed his face. "All right, Matt?" he called out, as if
the width of the road had been between them.

She turned her head to say: "It's dreadfully dark. Are you sure you can
see?"

He laughed contemptuously: "I could go down this coast with my
eyes tied!" and she laughed with him, as if she liked his audacity.
Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long
hill, for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when
the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in
a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances.

"Now!" he cried.

The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk,
gathering smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night
opening out below them and the air singing by like an organ. Mattie sat
perfectly still, but as they reached the bend at the foot of the hill,
where the big elm thrust out a deadly elbow, he fancied that she shrank
a little closer.

"Don't be scared, Matt!" he cried exultantly, as they spun safely past
it and flew down the second slope; and when they reached the level
ground beyond, and the speed of the sled began to slacken, he heard her
give a little laugh of glee.

They sprang off and started to walk back up the hill. Ethan dragged the
sled with one hand and passed the other through Mattie's arm.

"Were you scared I'd run you into the elm?" he asked with a boyish
laugh.

"I told you I was never scared with you," she answered.

The strange exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits
of boastfulness. "It is a tricky place, though. The least swerve,
and we'd never ha' come up again. But I can measure distances to a
hair's-breadth--always could."

She murmured: "I always say you've got the surest eye..."

Deep silence had fallen with the starless dusk, and they leaned on each
other without speaking; but at every step of their climb Ethan said to
himself: "It's the last time we'll ever walk together."

They mounted slowly to the top of the hill. When they were abreast of
the church he stooped his head to her to ask: "Are you tired?" and she
answered, breathing quickly: "It was splendid!"

With a pressure of his arm he guided her toward the Norway spruces. "I
guess this sled must be Ned Hale's. Anyhow I'll leave it where I found
it." He drew the sled up to the Varnum gate and rested it against the
fence. As he raised himself he suddenly felt Mattie close to him among
the shadows.

"Is this where Ned and Ruth kissed each other?" she whispered
breathlessly, and flung her arms about him. Her lips, groping for his,
swept over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise.

"Good-bye-good-bye," she stammered, and kissed him again.

"Oh, Matt, I can't let you go!" broke from him in the same old cry.

She freed herself from his hold and he heard her sobbing. "Oh, I can't
go either!" she wailed.

"Matt! What'll we do? What'll we do?"

They clung to each other's hands like children, and her body shook with
desperate sobs.

Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five.

"Oh, Ethan, it's time!" she cried.

He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to
leave you now?"

"If I missed my train where'd I go?"

"Where are you going if you catch it?"

She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his.

"What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one
now?" he said.

She remained motionless, as if she had not heard him. Then she snatched
her hands from his, threw her arms about his neck, and pressed a sudden
drenched cheek against his face. "Ethan! Ethan! I want you to take me
down again!"

"Down where?"

"The coast. Right off," she panted. "So 't we'll never come up any
more."

"Matt! What on earth do you mean?"

She put her lips close against his ear to say: "Right into the big elm.
You said you could. So 't we'd never have to leave each other any more."

"Why, what are you talking of? You're crazy!"

"I'm not crazy; but I will be if I leave you."

"Oh, Matt, Matt--" he groaned.

She tightened her fierce hold about his neck. Her face lay close to his
face.

"Ethan, where'll I go if I leave you? I don't know how to get along
alone. You said so yourself just now. Nobody but you was ever good to
me. And there'll be that strange girl in the house... and she'll sleep
in my bed, where I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the
stairs..."

The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the
hated vision of the house he was going back to--of the stairs he would
have to go up every night, of the woman who would wait for him there.
And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at
last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the
other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return
to...

Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer
heard what she was saying. Her hat had slipped back and he was stroking
her hair. He wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it
would sleep there like a seed in winter. Once he found her mouth again,
and they seemed to be by the pond together in the burning August sun.
But his cheek touched hers, and it was cold and full of weeping, and he
saw the road to the Flats under the night and heard the whistle of the
train up the line.

The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence. They might have been
in their coffins underground. He said to himself: "Perhaps it'll feel
like this..." and then again: "After this I sha'n't feel anything..."

Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought:
"He's wondering why he doesn't get his supper..."

"Come!" Mattie whispered, tugging at his hand.

Her sombre violence constrained him: she seemed the embodied instrument
of fate. He pulled the sled out, blinking like a night-bird as he passed
from the shade of the spruces into the transparent dusk of the open. The
slope below them was deserted. All Starkfield was at supper, and not a
figure crossed the open space before the church. The sky, swollen with
the clouds that announce a thaw, hung as low as before a summer storm.
He strained his eyes through the dimness, and they seemed less keen,
less capable than usual.

He took his seat on the sled and Mattie instantly placed herself in
front of him. Her hat had fallen into the snow and his lips were in her
hair. He stretched out his legs, drove his heels into the road to keep
the sled from slipping forward, and bent her head back between his
hands. Then suddenly he sprang up again.

"Get up," he ordered her.

It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat,
repeating vehemently: "No, no, no!"

"Get up!"

"Why?"

"I want to sit in front."

"No, no! How can you steer in front?"

"I don't have to. We'll follow the track."

They spoke in smothered whispers, as though the night were listening.

"Get up! Get up!" he urged her; but she kept on repeating: "Why do you
want to sit in front?"

"Because I--because I want to feel you holding me," he stammered, and
dragged her to her feet.

The answer seemed to satisfy her, or else she yielded to the power of
his voice. He bent down, feeling in the obscurity for the glassy slide
worn by preceding coasters, and placed the runners carefully between its
edges. She waited while he seated himself with crossed legs in the front
of the sled; then she crouched quickly down at his back and clasped her
arms about him. Her breath in his neck set him shuddering again, and
he almost sprang from his seat. But in a flash he remembered the
alternative. She was right: this was better than parting. He leaned back
and drew her mouth to his...

Just as they started he heard the sorrel's whinny again, and the
familiar wistful call, and all the confused images it brought with it,
went with him down the first reach of the road. Half-way down there
was a sudden drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious
descent. As they took wing for this it seemed to him that they were
flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy night, with Starkfield
immeasurably below them, falling away like a speck in space... Then the
big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of the road,
and he said between his teeth: "We can fetch it; I know we can fetch
it--"

As they flew toward the tree Mattie pressed her arms tighter, and her
blood seemed to be in his veins. Once or twice the sled swerved a little
under them. He slanted his body to keep it headed for the elm, repeating
to himself again and again: "I know we can fetch it"; and little phrases
she had spoken ran through his head and danced before him on the air.
The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it
he thought: "It's waiting for us: it seems to know." But suddenly his
wife's face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between
him and his goal, and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside.
The sled swerved in response, but he righted it again, kept it straight,
and drove down on the black projecting mass. There was a last instant
when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires; and then the
elm...

The sky was still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star,
and tried vaguely to reckon whether it were Sirius, or--or--The effort
tired him too much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he
would sleep... The stillness was so profound that he heard a little
animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small
frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if
it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so
excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through
his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the
sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as
though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under
his palm, which rested on something soft and springy. The thought of
the animal's suffering was intolerable to him and he struggled to raise
himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be
lying on him. But he continued to finger about cautiously with his left
hand, thinking he might get hold of the little creature and help it; and
all at once he knew that the soft thing he had touched was Mattie's hair
and that his hand was on her face.

He dragged himself to his knees, the monstrous load on him moving with
him as he moved, and his hand went over and over her face, and he felt
that the twittering came from her lips...

He got his face down close to hers, with his ear to her mouth, and in
the darkness he saw her eyes open and heard her say his name.

"Oh, Matt, I thought we'd fetched it," he moaned; and far off, up the
hill, he heard the sorrel whinny, and thought: "I ought to be getting
him his feed..."

*****

THE QUERULOUS DRONE ceased as I entered Frome's kitchen, and of the two
women sitting there I could not tell which had been the speaker.

One of them, on my appearing, raised her tall bony figure from her seat,
not as if to welcome me--for she threw me no more than a brief glance
of surprise--but simply to set about preparing the meal which Frome's
absence had delayed. A slatternly calico wrapper hung from her shoulders
and the wisps of her thin grey hair were drawn away from a high forehead
and fastened at the back by a broken comb. She had pale opaque eyes
which revealed nothing and reflected nothing, and her narrow lips were
of the same sallow colour as her face.

The other woman was much smaller and slighter. She sat huddled in an
arm-chair near the stove, and when I came in she turned her head quickly
toward me, without the least corresponding movement of her body.
Her hair was as grey as her companion's, her face as bloodless and
shrivelled, but amber-tinted, with swarthy shadows sharpening the nose
and hollowing the temples. Under her shapeless dress her body kept its
limp immobility, and her dark eyes had the bright witch-like stare that
disease of the spine sometimes gives.

Even for that part of the country the kitchen was a poor-looking place.
With the exception of the dark-eyed woman's chair, which looked like a
soiled relic of luxury bought at a country auction, the furniture was of
the roughest kind. Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug
had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple
of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood
meagrely against the plaster walls.

"My, it's cold here! The fire must be 'most out," Frome said, glancing
about him apologetically as he followed me in.

The tall woman, who had moved away from us toward the dresser, took no
notice; but the other, from her cushioned niche, answered complainingly,
in a high thin voice. "It's on'y just been made up this very minute.
Zeena fell asleep and slep' ever so long, and I thought I'd be frozen
stiff before I could wake her up and get her to 'tend to it."

I knew then that it was she who had been speaking when we entered.

Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains
of a cold mince-pie in a battered pie-dish, set down her unappetising
burden without appearing to hear the accusation brought against her.

Frome stood hesitatingly before her as she advanced; then he looked at
me and said: "This is my wife, Mis' Frome." After another interval he
added, turning toward the figure in the arm-chair: "And this is Miss
Mattie Silver..."

*****

Mrs. Hale, tender soul, had pictured me as lost in the Flats and buried
under a snow-drift; and so lively was her satisfaction on seeing me
safely restored to her the next morning that I felt my peril had caused
me to advance several degrees in her favour.

Great was her amazement, and that of old Mrs. Varnum, on learning that
Ethan Frome's old horse had carried me to and from Corbury Junction
through the worst blizzard of the winter; greater still their surprise
when they heard that his master had taken me in for the night.

Beneath their wondering exclamations I felt a secret curiosity to know
what impressions I had received from my night in the Frome household,
and divined that the best way of breaking down their reserve was to let
them try to penetrate mine. I therefore confined myself to saying, in a
matter-of-fact tone, that I had been received with great kindness, and
that Frome had made a bed for me in a room on the ground-floor which
seemed in happier days to have been fitted up as a kind of writing-room
or study.

"Well," Mrs. Hale mused, "in such a storm I suppose he felt he couldn't
do less than take you in--but I guess it went hard with Ethan. I don't
believe but what you're the only stranger has set foot in that house for
over twenty years. He's that proud he don't even like his oldest friends
to go there; and I don't know as any do, any more, except myself and the
doctor..."

"You still go there, Mrs. Hale?" I ventured.

"I used to go a good deal after the accident, when I was first married;
but after awhile I got to think it made 'em feel worse to see us. And
then one thing and another came, and my own troubles... But I generally
make out to drive over there round about New Year's, and once in the
summer. Only I always try to pick a day when Ethan's off somewheres.
It's bad enough to see the two women sitting there--but his face, when he
looks round that bare place, just kills me... You see, I can look back
and call it up in his mother's day, before their troubles."

Old Mrs. Varnum, by this time, had gone up to bed, and her daughter
and I were sitting alone, after supper, in the austere seclusion of
the horse-hair parlour. Mrs. Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though
trying to see how much footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed
that if she had kept silence till now it was because she had been
waiting, through all the years, for some one who should see what she
alone had seen.

I waited to let her trust in me gather strength before I said: "Yes,
it's pretty bad, seeing all three of them there together."

She drew her mild brows into a frown of pain. "It was just awful from
the beginning. I was here in the house when they were carried up--they
laid Mattie Silver in the room you're in. She and I were great friends,
and she was to have been my bridesmaid in the spring... When she came
to I went up to her and stayed all night. They gave her things to quiet
her, and she didn't know much till to'rd morning, and then all of a
sudden she woke up just like herself, and looked straight at me out
of her big eyes, and said... Oh, I don't know why I'm telling you all
this," Mrs. Hale broke off, crying.

She took off her spectacles, wiped the moisture from them, and put them
on again with an unsteady hand. "It got about the next day," she went
on, "that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a
hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she
and Ethan were doing that night coasting, when they'd ought to have been
on their way to the Flats to ketch the train... I never knew myself
what Zeena thought--I don't to this day. Nobody knows Zeena's thoughts.
Anyhow, when she heard o' the accident she came right in and stayed with
Ethan over to the minister's, where they'd carried him. And as soon as
the doctors said that Mattie could be moved, Zeena sent for her and took
her back to the farm."

"And there she's been ever since?"

Mrs. Hale answered simply: "There was nowhere else for her to go;" and
my heart tightened at the thought of the hard compulsions of the poor.

"Yes, there she's been," Mrs. Hale continued, "and Zeena's done for her,
and done for Ethan, as good as she could. It was a miracle, considering
how sick she was--but she seemed to be raised right up just when the call
came to her. Not as she's ever given up doctoring, and she's had sick
spells right along; but she's had the strength given her to care for
those two for over twenty years, and before the accident came she
thought she couldn't even care for herself."

Mrs. Hale paused a moment, and I remained silent, plunged in the vision
of what her words evoked. "It's horrible for them all," I murmured.

"Yes: it's pretty bad. And they ain't any of 'em easy people either.
Mattie was, before the accident; I never knew a sweeter nature. But
she's suffered too much--that's what I always say when folks tell me how
she's soured. And Zeena, she was always cranky. Not but what she bears
with Mattie wonderful--I've seen that myself. But sometimes the two
of them get going at each other, and then Ethan's face'd break your
heart... When I see that, I think it's him that suffers most... anyhow
it ain't Zeena, because she ain't got the time... It's a pity, though,"
Mrs. Hale ended, sighing, "that they're all shut up there'n that one
kitchen. In the summertime, on pleasant days, they move Mattie into
the parlour, or out in the door-yard, and that makes it easier... but
winters there's the fires to be thought of; and there ain't a dime to
spare up at the Fromes.'"

Mrs. Hale drew a deep breath, as though her memory were eased of its
long burden, and she had no more to say; but suddenly an impulse of
complete avowal seized her.

She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work
table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about
a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live.
Well, I say it's a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister
once, and he was shocked at me. Only he wasn't with me that morning
when she first came to... And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha'
lived; and the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference
between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard;
'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold
their tongues."

Ethan returns home and goes upstairs to help Mattie bring down her trunk. He finds her crying; she thought that he might have left for good, and that she was never going to see him again. He tries to comfort her, and helps her take her trunk down the stairs. At lunch he announces that he is going to take Mattie to the station himself. Zeena argues with him, but he insists vehemently that he'll be taking her. Claiming he has business in town, he plans to leave three hours before Mattie's 6 o'clock train. They set out at three, and Ethan takes advantage of the extra time to take Mattie on a long ride. They go to Shadow Pond, where he and Mattie enjoyed a church picnic together a few months earlier. Ethan takes Mattie down to a quiet spot in the woods. They talk sweetly to each other, more open in their affection than ever before. The pond, with its happy memories, becomes too painful. They return to the sleigh. As they ride on toward town Ethan asks what Mattie intends to do. Prospects aren't good, and though Mattie pretends she'll manage it seems clear that hard times are ahead of her. Mattie brings out the letter Ethan began to Zeena; she found it by accident. Ethan says, in anguish, that he can't leave the farm. But he asks Mattie if she would come with him if he could. She admits that she would, but their talk changes nothing. As they near the edge of town, Ethan persuades Mattie to come sledding with him; it's their last chance to go coasting down the hill. The find a sled and go down, despite the fact that it's twilight and the light is the most confusing of any time of day. The first trip down is exhilarating; Ethan steers well, and they reach the bottom safely. They climb up the hill and realize fully that soon they will never see each other again. Both begin to cry, unable to leave each other, telling each other that they can't bear to be apart. Mattie asks Ethan to take her down the hill again, straight into the big elm. She does not want to live without him. They get into the sled for a second ride down, Ethan in front this time. He won't be able to steer, but the track will carry them down straight into the tree. They go down the hill, but they don't die. Ethan comes to, disoriented. He is in unbelievable pain. He realizes he is holding Mattie; she, too, is still alive. He hears the horse whinnying up at the top of the hill, and he realizes that the horse needs feeding.

The realization that Mattie reciprocates his passion makes Ethan reckless. He is tortured by the happiness that lies outside of his reach. But the sled ride is not a carefully considered choice. Mattie and Ethan give in to passion, but the result is not freedom. Instead, they ruin their lives. The theme of illicit passion is not given a happy spin in Ethan Frome. When Mattie and Ethan succumb to it, they destroy themselves. Passion is not a liberator; Ethan and Mattie are not in control of their feelings. Passion is only another force that acts on man, robbing him of agency. The sled ride is a symbol for Wharton's conception of free will and fate, a conception shaped by Naturalism. Although Ethan has some power in steering the sleigh, the track carries them down on the final run. Ethan steers the sled to some extent, but gravity and the shape of the hill drive them down into the elm. Man's freedom exists within a very narrow range of options. In the opening, we already learned that Ethan had a terrible accident, and so the event seems all the more fixed. Wharton has been foreshadowing the accident all along. We also know that Ethan is still going to be alive at the time when the narrator arrives in Starkfield, and so we immediately know that their suicide attempt is going to be unsuccessful. The suicide attempt is the final and most terrible failed plan of Ethan Frome. It caps off a long string of aborted plans and frustrated wishes, and this time the consequences are tragic. Chapter 10: We are back with the narrator of the opening. He is entering Ethan Frome's house, and from afar he has heard the harsh sound of a woman complaining. In the kitchen two old women are sitting, one tall and severe, the other slight. The tall woman gets up to get supper on the table. The slight woman moves her head without moving her body; she is paralyzed. She has a witch-like stair and a nagging, terrible voice. Ethan introduces the women to the narrator: the tall woman is Zeena. The cripple is Mattie Silver. Later, the narrator is talking with the widowed Mrs. Hale . Mrs. Hale is surprised that Ethan invited the narrator in for the night. Not many go into the Frome home, on account of Ethan's pride. Mrs. Hale visits there one or two times a year. She tries to pick a day when Ethan is out, because she cannot bear to see the pain on his face. On the night of the accident, Zeena came right away to the minister's place, where the two of them had been taken. As soon as Mattie could be moved, Zeena had her brought back to the Frome farm. Mattie has been there ever since; she had nowhere else to go. Zeena has cared for them both for twenty years; somehow, she found the strength, even though at one time she believed she couldn't take care of herself. All of them are hard, bitter people. Mattie is hateful and difficult, and although Zeena usually bears it, at times the two of them quarrel viciously. At these times, the look on Ethan's face is heart-breaking. Mrs. Hale confides in the narrator that she thinks it would have been better if Mattie had died. The novel finishes with one of the more memorable closing lines of American literature, spoken by the widow with conviction: "And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and the way they are now, I don't see there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues." The narrator's outside view brings the Fromes' poverty into sharp relief. He remarks that even by the standards of the rural poor the Fromes' kitchen is squalid. And when we see Mattie Silver, now a paralyzed and hideous hag, we are reminded that she had nowhere else to go. Ethan Frome is partially a reaction against portraits of rural living that romanticized poverty and farming. Wharton shows again and again that poverty is soul-destroying. It has taken away Ethan's chances at happiness again and again. It forced Mattie to stay with the Fromes after the accident, and it has led to all of them ending life as stunted, hateful people. We see the theme of time as destroyer, waster. Before, the novel has given us the contrast between buildings as they were in the past and as they stand now; we have also seen the painful contrast between the young Ethan and the old lame man he becomes. But Mattie's transformation is the most horrible change we have seen. She is transformed from a lively, pretty girl to a hideous and bitter crone. Her re-entrance as an old cripple is one of the novel's most chilling moments. Zeena's transformation is an interesting and ambiguous development. Some have read it as showing that Zeena possessed untapped reserves of strength and compassion; however, this reading runs up against some significant counter-evidence. The first is the narrator's description of her: "She had pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing" . Hardly the description of a saint. Zeena has hardened to fit her circumstances; Mrs. Hale says that Zeena is not the one who suffers most, because she no longer has time to suffer. Just as she was able to care for Frome's mother, she finds it in herself to care for Ethan and Mattie. But her care is not marked by compassion or tenderness; this is care that comes because there is no other choice. And given what Chapter 7 revealed about Zeena's character, her transformation can be read very darkly. She can now afford to care for Ethan and Mattie because she no longer needs to worry about losing Ethan. If her earlier hypochondria was a way of controlling Ethan, it is no longer necessary. He is lame and needs her; in a similar way, Mattie no longer poses any kind of threat. All is stable at the Frome farm; there is no longer any way for Zeena to lose control of the situation. We finish with the graveyard that made such an impression on Ethan in his youth. The tombs are more than a reminder of mortality; Mrs. Hale says that the three living at the farm are like people already dead. They will continue to live in this way for a while yet; Harmon Gow assured the narrator that the Fromes are a hardy breed, and Ethan will probably live to be a hundred. We are reminded of the tombstone that bore Ethan's name, recording how a previous Ethan had lived with his wife "Endurance" for fifty years. Those fifty years become a grim promise. Ethan must live on, continuing to eke out a living on his farm's poor soil. The theme of determinism finishes here, with three people trapped together for the rest of their lives. Ethan will stay at the farm because he has no choice; he is as trapped and lifeless as his ancestors in the Frome burial ground.


The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy
corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was
so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray
against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the
basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across
the endless undulations.

Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past
the bank and Michael Eady's new brick store and Lawyer Varnum's house
with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate,
where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared
its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked
toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade along the side wall of
the building, but from the lower openings, on the side where the ground
sloped steeply down to the Corbury road, the light shot its long bars,
illuminating many fresh furrows in the track leading to the basement
door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with
heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave
little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of
a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than
ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic
dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted receiver," he
thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year's course at a
technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with
a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that
experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally
different associations of thought in which he had since been living. His
father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature
end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be
of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge
cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in
his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp.
At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the
church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and
down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of
the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's spruces, was the favourite
coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner
rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled
darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay
on the village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church
windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands
of yellow light.

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope
toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing rays
from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually
approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging
the shadow, he edged his way cautiously forward to the nearest window,
holding back his straight spare body and craning his neck till he got a
glimpse of the room.

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it
seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the
gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and
the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as though
they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with
girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of
kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen. By this time
the music had stopped, and the musicians--a fiddler, and the young lady
who played the harmonium on Sundays--were hastily refreshing themselves
at one corner of the supper-table which aligned its devastated
pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall.
The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward
the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a
sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of
the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect.
The musicians hurried to their instruments, the dancers--some already
half-muffled for departure--fell into line down each side of the room,
the older spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young
man, after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl
who had already wound a cherry-coloured "fascinator" about her head,
and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its length
to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.

Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse
of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed him that
another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel,
who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his
partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure
swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf
flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each
turn, caught sight of her laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair
about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points
in a maze of flying lines.

The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep
up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing their
mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window
that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the
girl's face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the
dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership. Denis Eady was
the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness
and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business
methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the
attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile
applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood.
Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but
now he positively invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the
girl did not seem aware of it: that she could lift her rapt face to her
dancer's, and drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the
offence of his look and touch.

Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his
wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some chance of
amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested,
when the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be
put in her way. Mattie Silver came from Stamford, and when she entered
the Fromes' household to act as her cousin Zeena's aid it was thought
best, as she came without pay, not to let her feel too sharp a contrast
between the life she had left and the isolation of a Starkfield farm.
But for this--as Frome sardonically reflected--it would hardly have
occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl's amusement.

When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an occasional
evening out he had inwardly demurred at having to do the extra two miles
to the village and back after his hard day on the farm; but not long
afterward he had reached the point of wishing that Starkfield might give
all its nights to revelry.

Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early
morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing her;
but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in
his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they
walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken to the girl from
the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats to meet her, and
she had smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, "You must be
Ethan!" as she jumped down with her bundles, while he reflected, looking
over her slight person: "She don't look much on housework, but she ain't
a fretter, anyhow." But it was not only that the coming to his house of
a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold
hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had
thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her
things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he
imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most
intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more
sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His
unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his
unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful
persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even
know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he
was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that
one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder: that at his
side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom
he could say: "That's Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is
Aldebaran, and the bunch of little ones--like bees swarming--they're the
Pleiades..." or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite
thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the
ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that
admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie's wonder at what he
taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other
sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together
with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter
hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the
intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him
once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the
art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been
found to utter his secret soul....

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the
floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought
that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her
presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she
lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always
looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or
three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him:
a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her
laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when
anything charmed or moved her.

The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears.
His wife had never shown any jealousy of Mattie, but of late she had
grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique ways of
attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena had always been
what Starkfield called "sickly," and Frome had to admit that, if she
were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of a stronger arm
than the one which lay so lightly in his during the night walks to the
farm. Mattie had no natural turn for housekeeping, and her training had
done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful
and dreamy, and not disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had
an idea that if she were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant
instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the
county; but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first
she was so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she
laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to
supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light
the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the
mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day.
He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen floor after
the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had surprised him at the
churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks.

Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but
more disquieting. One cold winter morning, as he dressed in the dark,
his candle flickering in the draught of the ill-fitting window, he had
heard her speak from the bed behind him.

"The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me,"
she said in her flat whine.

He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had
startled him, though she was given to abrupt explosions of speech after
long intervals of secretive silence.

He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined under
the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish tinge from
the whiteness of the pillow.

"Nobody to do for you?" he repeated.

"If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes."

Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the
reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-glass above
the wash-stand.

"Why on earth should Mattie go?"

"Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from behind
him.

"Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her," he returned,
scraping hard at his chin.

"I wouldn't ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl
like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady," Zeena answered in
a tone of plaintive self-effacement.

Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw
the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude was an
excuse for not making an immediate reply.

"And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody," Zeena
continued. "He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he's heard
about, that might come--"

Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.

"Denis Eady! If that's all, I guess there's no such hurry to look round
for a girl."

"Well, I'd like to talk to you about it," said Zeena obstinately.

He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. "All right. But I
haven't got the time now; I'm late as it is," he returned, holding his
old silver turnip-watch to the candle.

Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in silence
while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked his arms
into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and
incisively: "I guess you're always late, now you shave every morning."

That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about
Denis Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver's coming he had taken
to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he
left her side in the winter darkness, and he had stupidly assumed that
she would not notice any change in his appearance. Once or twice in the
past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia's way of letting things
happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in
a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and
drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there had been no room in his
thoughts for such vague apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive
reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived
in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive
of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw
Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded
hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain....

There is deep snow on the ground, and the sky is full of stars, and the lights seeping from the windows of the church basement are yellow. "Young Ethan Frome" is rapidly clicking along the street toward it. There is no breeze, and the cold air is hardly seems cold, as if there was no atmosphere. Ethan thinks, "It's like being in an exhausted receiver" . , creating a vacuum. Think of a bicycle pump.) Several years earlier Ethan had studied physics in college for about a year, and remembered things about it now and again. When his dad died, and everything started to go bad, Ethan had to stop school. Ethan arrives at the church and looks around. He sees Corbury Road. Kids love to sled down the hill nearby, though on this night there is no sledding, probably because all the youngsters are in the church basement at the dance. Now Ethan is peeping in the window of the church basement. The scene looks hot, especially in contrast to the still cold of the night. The dance is over. The music has stopped, and the attendees begin leaving. But wait.... A dark haired man hops and skips onto the dance floor, and claps his hands. The music begins anew. The man takes the hand of pretty, young lass. She and the man begin to dance while the band plays a "Virginia reel." Ethan's heart is pounding. He was trying to see the face of the dancing girl, and is irritated that she was dancing with the fiery Irish youth. Still, he watches her dance, noting that the Irish youth in question is Denis Eady, son of Michael, the grocer. This guy Denis looks like he thinks he owns the girl. Ethan doesn't like Denis, and can't imagine how the girl doesn't notice that he's a creep. The girl is Mattie Silver, Ethan's wife's cousin. Ethan came to pick her up whenever she came to town in the evenings. Both of Mattie's parents had died and she had nowhere to go, so she had come to live with the Fromes. She helps care for the house, and for Zeena . Since they didn't pay her Zeena, thought that Mattie should get some entertainment and suggested she participate in the Starkfield social party scene. Ethan wasn't thrilled with this at first, as it meant that he would have to walk two more miles than usual to pick her up. But now, he wishes that Mattie would party every night. Mattie has lived with the Fromes for about a year, and Ethan's favorite thing is to be near her. His favorite way to be near her is walking, arms locked together, back from town on these nights. He'd liked Mattie right away, and hoped she would breath some life into the house. In fact, she is smart, and she and Ethan had excellent conversations together, mostly about nature. Ethan is into natural beauty, and Mattie shared this love. He could point out the constellations to her, and talk to her about the history of the earth. As he watches her dancing, he is remembering their times together, and now thinking that she must have been humoring all along. He thinks he's silly to think that a girl like Mattie would really be interested in him. Since Ethan is only light and happy when around Mattie, it strikes him that she can be light and happy without him. He notices also that the way she laughs with him is the same way she laughs when with this Denis Eady character. This bums him out, and brings his fears to mind. Though Zeena had never seemed jealous of Mattie, lately, she had been finding constant fault with the girl. Zeena had always had health issues, and Mattie probably wasn't the strongest and best helper in the word. She was a decent housekeeper, but one could tell her heart wasn't quite in it, and she was prone to dreaminess. Ethan thought that if she had a house of her own, her inner housewife would come emerge. For now, Ethan helps Mattie with the chores. Once Zeena caught him churning butter and gave him a funky look. Zeena has also been whining more lately, and hinting that Mattie might be leaving soon, perhaps to get married, and that she would need somebody new, though they couldn't afford it. Ethan remembers a conversation he just had with Zeena about Mattie. Ethan had assured Zeena that Mattie would never abandon her. Zeena had said she didn't want to get in between Mattie's happiness with Denis Eady. This had shocked Ethan, who was shaving at the moment. He insisted that no such romance was budding. Zeena wanted to continue the conversation, but Ethan claims he's late to pick up Mattie. This doesn't please Zeena, and she comments on a pattern of lateness she's noticed in Ethan, and a pattern of shaving every morning. This shocked him even more than the Denis Eady business. He hadn't thought that she noticed this new need to shave that happened to coincide with Mattie's moving in with them. Zeena had always been like that though, noticing something he thought she hadn't noticed, and then bringing it up slyly when he was off-guard. But lately, he'd been to busy dreaming of Mattie Silver to worry much about Zeena oppression. As Ethan watches Mattie and Denis dancing, all the little hints that Zeena had been giving about Mattie and Denis came together.

One moonless winter night, when Starkfield is under two feet of snow, Ethan Frome walks along the deserted main street and towards the church. Light from the church basement windows throws long shadows across the snow, down to Corbury Road. Under an adjoining shed are sleighs and blanketed horses. Ethan thinks of the night in terms of principles of physics; though he left school years earlier, the images of that experience still appear to him on occasion. His life now bears little relation to the life of learning, and though he didn't stay at college long enough to make practical use of his studies, he still has an appreciation for the life of the mind. Ethan stops to look at the deserted hill where townspeople often bring their sleds to coast. In the quiet, he turns alongside the church and sneaks up to a window to look into the basement room, which is full of the heat of dancers. A row of older women sit along the wall, watching the young folk dance. The music has stopped, and the people are gathering to leave. The food-table has been ravaged, and the musicians have put up their instruments. Then a young man steps up and claps his hands, and everyone flows back into the room for one more dance. The young man finds his partner, a girl with a cherry-colored scarf in her hair, and they begin a lively Virginia Reel. Ethan's heart beats fast as he watches. He has been looking for the girl with the cherry scarf, and he is jealous of the young man dancing with her. He watches her dance, faster and faster, and feels the dance will never end. He looks from the girl's face to the face of her partner, Denis Eady. He is the son of an ambitious Irish grocer, and Ethan sees him as possessive, smart, and deserving of a whipping. Ethan does not understand why the girl is not offended by Denis's attentions. Ethan often walks into town to meet his wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, and bring her home after an evening's amusement. Ethan's wife Zeena has suggested that the girl, who is living with them, be encouraged to enjoy herself. Zeena knows that Mattie has little happiness; she has left her very different lifestyle in the town of Stamford to come and work on the Frome farm and care for sickly Zeena without pay. When Zeena Frome suggested the outings, Ethan did not like the idea, but he soon came to look forward to the walks home with Mattie. He also suspects that his wife's desires for Mattie's social life are driven by ulterior motives. Mattie has lived with the Fromes for a year, and Ethan has come to enjoy her company very much. Small and lively, she is not a "fretter," and the girl brings a brightness to the Frome household. She looks and listens when Ethan talks to her, and he feels that she is another sensitive being, able to connect with his emotions about the beauty of the world; she trembles to the "same touch of wonder." They enjoy talking of stars and geology, and Ethan feels other "less definable" sensations, which bring them together in enjoyment. He feels that Mattie speaks to his soul. Watching the dance, Ethan feels a sense of loss. He sees himself as uninteresting, not so merry as the life he observes through the window. He notes that Mattie's looks and gestures, which he thought were reserved for him, are out there for everyone to see. Sharing her makes him unhappy and fearful. He then recalls that his wife has lately been displeased with Mattie, with her inefficiency. Zeena, who has always been "sickly," feels she needs better help than what the city-bred Mattie provides. In truth, Mattie, who is quick to learn, can be dreamy and forgetful. Ethan thinks that if she were to marry a man she loves, her dormant household instincts would flourish. As it is, he has laughed with her about her foibles and helped her with her chores. Zeena once caught him churning the butter for Mattie and silently turned away. Lately, Zeena has been even more vocal in her disapproval of Mattie. One cold winter morning, she whines that Mattie is likely to marry Denis Eady, and she herself will not stand in the way of Mattie making such a good match. Ethan shaves, listens, and does not answer. Zeena then complains to Ethan that the doctor has said she needs help and that Ethan must hire a girl when Mattie goes away. Ethan notes his wife's grayish face and wonders aloud why Mattie should go. Zeena again says she needs hired help who will be more proficient than Mattie; the doctor has told her about a girl who might be available. Ethan dismisses the idea of Denis Eady and of hiring anyone. He hurries to dress, ignoring Zeena's request to talk more about it. He leaves abruptly, claiming he is late. Zeena guesses aloud that he is always late now, since he has started shaving every morning. Zeena's observation frightens Ethan. He has thought his wife has not noticed him shaving. He is disquieted by his wife's subtle observations and her casual phrases that show she has been watching and drawing conclusions. Lately, Ethan has not paid too much attention to his wife. Zeena has faded into the background for him, since he now lives in the light of Mattie Silver. He cannot conceive of life without her, though in his sudden worry he remembers watching Mattie and Denis dance.

We flash back to twenty-four years ago. It is midnight and once again, the village is under snow. Ethan Frome is walking along the quiet streets. Four or five years earlier he had taken a course at a technical college, but his studies had been broken off by his father's death and the misfortunes that followed it. Ethan stops in front of the church, where a dance is in progress. He peers in through the window, careful to stay unseen. His gaze is drawn to a girl with a cherry-colored scarf around her head, dancing with a young man. We learn that her dance partner is Denis Eady, son of Michael Eady, a successful Irish grocer. Ethan is angry at Eady's show of ownership over the girl. We then learn that the girl is Mattie Silver, the daughter of Ethan's wife's cousin. Mattie came to live with the Fromes a year ago as home help to the sickly Zeena. Zeena wants Mattie to go to such events as the dance in order to offset the isolation of the Starkfield farm. Mattie is unpaid, or  Zeena would not have been so considerate. At first, Ethan resented having to accompany Mattie the two miles into the village and back, but now he wishes that he did it every night. He delights in their walks to and from the village, and her presence heightens his already sensitive appreciation of the natural beauty around him. He is able to talk to her of the constellations and how the ice age formed the landscape around them, and she responds with wonder. Now, he feels unhappy that she is lifting the same joyful face to her dance partners as she lifts to him. He also worries because Zeena is complaining at Mattie's inefficiency with the housework. Ethan had started to neglect the farm so that he could help her around the house. One night, he had come downstairs to scrub the kitchen floor after the women had gone to bed, and Zeena had caught him, and given him one of her silent "queer looks." . Zeena had shown other signs of disquiet about Mattie. One morning, she had told Ethan that the doctor said she should not be left without someone to do the housework for her. Ethan had asked what she meant. Zeena had said that Mattie would probably marry soon and leave them. Ethan had replied that she would not leave as long as Zeena needed her, but Zeena had said that she would not stand in the way of Mattie marrying a "smart fellow" like Denis Eady. Zeena had said that the doctor has recommended a girl to replace Mattie. Ethan had told her he could not discuss it now, as he was late for work. Zeena makes a sly remark to the effect that this is because he now shaves daily, implying that he is doing so for Mattie. Ethan had recognized this as a hostile "thrust," and had realised that Zeena may have guessed his feelings for Mattie. While during his conversation with Zeena he had not been worried by her reference to Denis Eady, now that he is standing outside the church watching Mattie dance with Denis, he feels disturbed.

. The fact that Ethan's studies at college had been sufficient to make him "aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things" but not sufficient to be of any practical use is typical of the state of limbo, or half-life in which Ethan exists. Mattie Silver, whom we first see dancing with a cherry-colored scarf around her hair, represents a vivid streak of life and sensuality in his monochrome, frigid, monotonous existence: ".the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. " The color symbolism is continued in the red sunsets they watch together on their walks to and from the village, which he sees reflected in her face. The contrast between Mattie and Zeena is clear at our first sight of Zeena. One cold winter morning, as Ethan dresses in the dark, Zeena's "flat whine" comes spookily out of the gloom from the bed behind him. Her first words, "The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me," indirectly tells us much about her. We see that she has become used to the invalid life, that she wishes it to continue, and that she expects others to support her. We also see her manipulative nature in the way she places her own wishes in the authoritative mouth of the doctor and her assumption that Mattie will leave. In fact, she already engineering Mattie's departure, but she speaks of it as Mattie's own desire, for the ostensible reason that she will undoubtedly want to marry. Zeena's comment also has a deeper resonance: it suggests that on some level she fears that Ethan and Mattie will run off together and leave her alone. The contrast between the women is reflected in the color symbolism. While Mattie's symbolic colors are passionate red  and flashing silver , those associated with Ethan's dismal household are grey, white and black - a monochrome palette. Zeena is portrayed as lying under a "dark" quilt, her bony face grey against her white pillow. Zeena displays her slyness in her indirect remarks to her husband. Ostensibly talking about his habitual lateness arriving at work, she points out that it might be due to the fact that he shaves every day now. He recognizes this as a hostile "thrust", implying that he is prettying himself up for Mattie. He is surprised, as he thought that she was always asleep when he left for work. The impression we gain of Zeena is that of a silent, sinister watcher who is not straightforward about her intentions and motives. Mattie and Ethan are also contrasted, through the imagery of light and dark that permeates the novel. Mattie is portrayed in terms of life-giving light and warmth, Ethan in terms of death-like darkness and cold. When he is waiting outside in the cold for Mattie to emerge from the warm, bright dance hall, he retreats into the "darkness" and "shadows."