We have not written for many days. We did not wish to speak. For
we needed no words to remember that which has happened to us.

It was on our second day in the forest that we heard steps behind
us. We hid in the bushes, and we waited. The steps came closer.
And then we saw the fold of a white tunic among the trees, and a
gleam of gold.

We leapt forward, we ran to them, and we stood looking upon the
Golden One.

They saw us, and their hands closed into fists, and the fists
pulled their arms down, as if they wished their arms to hold
them, while their body swayed. And they could not speak.

We dared not come too close to them. We asked, and our voice
trembled:

"How [-did you-] come {+you+} to be here, Golden One?"

{+But they whispered only:+}

"We have found you. . . ."

"How [-did you-] come {+you+} to be in the forest?" we asked.

They raised their head, and there was a great pride in their
voice; they answered:

"We have followed you."

Then we could not speak, and they said:

"We heard that you had gone to the Uncharted Forest, for the
whole City is speaking of it. So on the night of the day when we
heard it, we ran away from the Home of the Peasants. We found the
marks of your feet across the plain where no men walk. So we
followed them, and we went into the forest, and we followed
the path where the branches were broken by your body."

Their white tunic was torn, and the branches had cut the skin of
their arms, but they spoke as if they had never taken notice of
it, nor of weariness, nor of fear.

"We have followed you," they said, "and we shall follow you
wherever you go. If danger threatens you, we shall face it also.
If it be death, we shall die with you. You are damned, and we
wish to share your damnation."

They looked upon us, and their voice was low, but there was
bitterness and triumph in their [-voice.-] {+voice:+}

"Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor
fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and
humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but
our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than [-pleased-] {+be
blessed+} with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do
not send us away from you."

Then they knelt, and bowed their golden head before us.

We had never thought of that which we did. We bent to raise the
Golden One to their feet, but when we touched them, it was as if
madness had stricken us. We seized their body and we pressed our
lips to theirs. The Golden One breathed once, and their breath
was a moan, and then their arms closed around us.

We stood together for a long time. And we were frightened that we
had lived for twenty-one years and had never known what joy is
possible to men.

Then we said:

"Our dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger
in solitude. We have no need of our brothers. Let us forget their
good and our evil, let us forget all things save that we are
together and that there is joy [-as a bond-] between us. Give us your hand.
Look ahead. It is our own world, Golden One, a strange, unknown
world, but our own."

Then we walked on into the forest, their hand in ours.

And that night we knew that to hold the body of [-women-] {+a woman+} in our
arms is neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to
the race of men.

We have walked for many days. The forest has no end, and we seek
no end. But each day added to the chain of days between us and
the City is like an added blessing.

We have made a bow and many arrows. We can kill more birds than
we need for our food; we find water and fruit in the forest. At
night, we choose a clearing, and we build a ring of fires around
it. We sleep in the midst of that ring, and the beasts dare not attack us.
We can see their eyes, green and yellow as coals, watching us
from the tree branches beyond. The fires [-smoulder-] {+smolder+} as a crown
of jewels around us, and smoke stands still in the air, in
columns made blue by the moonlight. We sleep together in the
midst of the ring, the arms of the Golden One around us, their
head upon our breast.

Some day, we shall stop and build a house, when we shall have
gone far enough. But we do not have to hasten. The days before us
are without end, like the forest.

We cannot understand this new life which we have found, yet it
seems so clear and so simple. When questions come to puzzle us,
we walk faster, then turn and forget all things as we watch the
Golden One following. The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms,
as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the
sun. The skin of their arms is like a blue [-mist.-] {+mist,+} but their
shoulders are white and glowing, as if the light fell not from
above, but rose from under their skin. We watch the leaf which
has fallen upon their shoulder, and it lies at the curve of their
neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel. They
approach us, and they stop, laughing, knowing what we think, and
they wait obediently, without questions, till it pleases us to
turn and go on.

We go on and we bless the earth under our feet. But questions
come to us again, as we walk in silence. If that which we have
found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for
save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, then
what is good and what is evil?

Everything which comes from the many is good. Everything which
comes from one is evil.
[-This have-] {+Thus+} we {+have+} been taught with our first
breath. We have broken the law, but we have never doubted it. Yet
now, as we walk [-through-] the forest, we are learning to doubt.

There is no life for men, save in useful toil for the good of [-all-]
their brothers. But we lived not, when we toiled for our
brothers, we were only weary. There is no joy for men, save the
joy shared with all their brothers. But the only things which
taught us joy were the power [-we-] created in our wires, and the Golden
One. And both these joys belong to us alone, they come from us
alone, they bear no relation to [-all-] our brothers, and they do not
concern our brothers in any way. Thus do we wonder.

There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men.
What is that error? We do not know, but the knowledge struggles
within us, struggles to be born.

Today, the Golden One stopped suddenly and said:

"We love you."

But {+then+} they frowned and shook their head and looked at us
helplessly.

"No," they whispered, "that is not what we wished to say."

They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were
halting, like the words of a child learning to speak for the
first time:

"We are one . . . alone . . . and only . . . and we love you who
are one . . . alone . . . and only."

We looked into each other's eyes and we knew that the breath of a
miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly.

And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.

Several days later, Equality 7-2521 begins writing in his journal for the first time since he entered the Uncharted Forest. As he is walking through the forest, Equality 7-2521 hears footsteps behind him and discovers that the Golden One has followed him into the forest. He asks her how she came to be in the forest, and she answers, swaying with her fists at her side, only that she has found him. He asks her again, and she tells him that she has followed him because she heard talk all over the city of his encounter with the World Council of Scholars and his fleeing into the Uncharted Forest. The Golden One is tattered from the journey through the forest, but she is not weary or afraid. She tells Equality 7-2521 she wants to share in his damnation and to follow him wherever he goes. Her voice is bitter and triumphant as she tells him that he is harder, prouder, and more beautiful than her brothers. She begs him to do what he will with her but not to send her away, and she bows in front of him. He raises her to her feet and kisses her, amazed by the very idea of kissing. They stand together for a long time. Equality 7-2521 tells the Golden One that there is nothing to fear in the forest or in their solitude, and he suggests that they forget their brothers and remember only that they are together and have joy between them. He declares the world their own, and they walk through the forest hand in hand. That night they have sex, and Equality 7-2521 realizes that sex is the only ecstasy in a man's life. Equality 7-2521 and the Golden One walk for several days together and make bows and arrows to kill birds. At night, they sleep in a ring of campfires, to keep out the beasts. They plan to stop and build a house some day, and they see their days together as endless. When Equality 7-2521 begins to be puzzled by his new life, he hurries ahead and forgets his troubles as he watches the Golden One following him. She is completely obedient to him and does not question him about anything. For the first time in his life, Equality 7-2521 begins to doubt the laws he was taught by the society in which he lived. He questions how it can be that everything that is solitude is evil when he and the Golden One are pursuing solitude in such happiness. He observes that the only things that have ever given him joy in his life are the lightbulb and the Golden One, neither of which has anything to do with his brothers. He concludes that both these joys come from himself alone. He also begins to suspect that there is some error in the way he has been thinking up to this point, that there is some word that is missing from his vocabulary, but he does not know what it is. The Golden One tries to tell Equality 7-2521 that she loves him, but she does not know how to say the word "I." She tells him that "e love you," but she is not satisfied with this articulation of her feelings, and she gropes for something more personal but does not know how to express it. The moment leaves both of them feeling confused.

Feminists are troubled by Rand's view of women, especially by the Golden One's subservience to Equality 7-2521 and her inherent inability to create solutions to her intellectual puzzles without the help of Equality 7-2521. They note that the Golden One is never appreciated for her own worth but instead is worshipped as an object, that even her name is somewhat insulting in that it characterizes her by the color of her hair, and that she has virtually no part in the story except as the thing that Equality 7-2521 adores. Rand might answer that when the Golden One bows in front of Equality 7-2521, she is merely acknowledging the perfection in him and offering him herself as equally perfect. After all, she would say, Equality 7-2521 is drawn to her as much as she is drawn to him, and her fleeing society to chase him into the forest represents as great a break with society as his confrontation with the World Council of Scholars. Moreover, Rand might say, the Golden One suspects at the same time that Equality 7-2521 does that the lack of the word "I" is a major problem. Nevertheless, feminists are not satisfied with the continuous emphasis on the Golden One's dependence on Equality 7-2521 and her constantly following him while he offers her no reciprocal form of trust. They argue that Equality 7-2521's observation that the lightbulb and the Golden One both spring from himself belittles the Golden One, who is, after all, not the actual invention of Equality 7-2521. Rand might respond that she is merely mimicking the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve springs from Adam's rib and is, in a certain sense, an extension of her husband. Rand presents several ways of testing the world around us in Anthem, and ultimately she concludes that the best way to make determinations about the world is to test them against our own inner reactions. As Equality 7-2521 begins to doubt his society for the first time, he engages in a kind of thought process previously foreign to him in that he begins to compare what he is discovering of the world to what he has been taught of it. Notably, the way that Equality 7-2521 uncovers truths about the world is very different from the way he proceeds earlier with his scientific experiments. In his experiments, he proceeds like a good scientist, tinkering and tooling until his lightbulb works, and testing and retesting, while isolating factors, to discover electricity. When investigating facts about the world, however, Equality 7-2521 proceeds largely by instinct, so that he is called by his heart to discover that there is some word missing from his vocabulary, but he does not have an experiment to perform to determine what it is. Likewise, when he is trying to discover what makes him happy, he proceeds chiefly through induction, observing which things make him happy and determining where those things come from, in order to determine how happiness comes to be. To determine what is true about human nature, he must act as his own instrument. Anthem's extensive foreshadowing gives away many of the secrets of the story before Rand reveals them. The Golden One's attempt to say "I love you," for example, is one of several events that foreshadow the massive revelation, at the end of Anthem, that the individual is the center of the universe. The Transgressor of the Unspeakable Word's death in Chapter II, before which he specifically seeks out Equality 7-2521 as he burns in the town square, also presages the coming realization that what Equality 7-2521 has been missing is the word "I." Most obvious, the language of the entire novella, which uses the first person plural "we" to refer to the individual is a major clue that the resolution of the story's conflict involves a shift in the language. Indeed, taken as a whole, these clues leave very little suspense in Anthem. It is fairly clear from the outset and at every step of the way that Rand is leading us to an ego-centered world. The lack of suspense, however, which reinforces the idea that Anthem is more political manifesto than fiction, allows Rand to drive her point home time and again without making us wonder where she is headed.


It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house
that I saw the word "I." And when I understood this word, the
book fell from my hands, and I wept, I who had never known tears.
I wept in deliverance and in pity for all mankind.

I understood the blessed thing which I had called my curse. I
understood why the best in me had been my sins and my
transgressions; and why I had never felt guilt in my sins. I
understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the
spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

I read {+many+} books for many days. Then I called the Golden One,
and I told her what I had read and what I had learned. She looked
at me and the first words she spoke were:

"I love you."

Then I said:

"My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names.
There was a time when each man had a name of his own to
distinguish him from all other men. So let us choose our names. I
have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of
all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He
took the light of the gods and [-he-] brought it to men, and he taught
men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of
light must suffer. His name was Prometheus."

"It shall be your name," said the Golden One.

"And I have read of a goddess," I said, "who was the mother of
the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be
your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new
kind of gods."

"It shall be my name," said the Golden One.

Now I look ahead. My future is clear before me. The Saint of the
pyre had seen the future when he chose me as his heir, as the
heir of all the saints and all the martyrs who came before him
and who died for the same cause, for the same word, no matter
what name they gave to their cause and their truth.

I shall live here, in my own house. I shall take my food from the
earth by the toil of my own hands. I shall learn many secrets
from my books. Through the years ahead, I shall rebuild the
achievements of the past, and open the way to carry them further,
the achievements which are open to me, but closed forever to my
brothers, for their minds are shackled to the weakest and dullest [-ones-]
among them.

I have learned that [-my-] {+the+} power of the sky was known to men long
ago; they called it Electricity. It was the power that moved
their greatest inventions. It lit this house with light [-which-] {+that+} came
from those globes of glass on the walls. I have found the engine
which produced this light. I shall learn how to repair it and how
to make it work again. I shall learn how to use the wires which
carry this power. Then I shall build a barrier of wires around my
home, and across the paths which lead to my home; a barrier light
as a cobweb, more impassable [-that-] {+than+} a wall of granite; a barrier my
brothers will never be able to cross. For they have nothing to
fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my
mind.

Then here, on this mountaintop, with the world below me and
nothing above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth. Gaea is
pregnant with my child.  [-Our son
will be raised as a man.-] He will be taught to say "I" and to bear
the pride of it. He will be taught to walk straight [-and-] on his own
feet. He will be taught reverence for his own spirit.

When I shall have read all the books and learned my new way, when
my home will be ready and my earth tilled, I shall steal one day,
for the last time, into the cursed City of my birth. I shall call
to me my friend who has no name save International 4-8818, and
all those like him, Fraternity 2-5503, who cries without reason,
and Solidarity [-9-6347-] {+8-6347+} who calls for help in the night, and a few
others. I shall call to me all the men and the women whose spirit
has not been killed within them and who suffer under the yoke of
their brothers. They will follow me and I shall lead them to my
fortress. And here, in this uncharted wilderness, I and they, my
chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the first chapter
in the new history of man.

These are the {+last+} things before me. And as I stand here at the
door of glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon
the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I
wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was
the spirit of man's freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from
what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him,
save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.
That is freedom. That and nothing else.

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their
chains.  [-The-] {+Then+} he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their
chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race.
But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a
man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take
away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right
of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he
stood on the threshold of [-the-] freedom for which the blood of the
centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his
savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away
from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and
submission? The worship of the word "We."

When men accepted that worship, the structure {+of centuries
collapsed about them, the structure+} whose every beam had come
from the thought of some one man, each in his day down the ages,
from the depth of some one spirit, such [-spirit-] as {+spirit+} existed but for
its own sake. Those men who [-survived-] {+survived-+} those eager to obey, eager
to live for one another, since they had nothing else to vindicate [-them--those-]
{+them- those+} men could neither carry on, nor preserve what they
had received. Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom
perish on earth. Thus did [-men---] {+men-+} men with nothing to offer save
their great [-number--
lost-] {+numbers- lose+} the steel towers, the flying ships, the
power wires, all the things they had not created and could never
keep. Perhaps, later, some men had been born with the mind and
the courage to recover these things which were lost; perhaps
these men came before the Councils of Scholars. They [-were-] answered as
I have been [-answered---] {+answered-+} and for the same reasons.

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years
of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were
going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I
wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word [-"I"-] {+"I,"+}
could give it up and not know what they {+had+} lost. But such has been
the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned,
and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.

Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of
clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word.
What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw
coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and
in warning. But men paid no heed to their warning. And they, [-these-]
{+those+} few, fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their
banners smeared by their own blood. And they chose to perish, for
they knew. To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.

[-Their-]

{+Theirs+} is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to
tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final,
and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost
can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never
perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which
men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this
earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but
it will break through. And man will go on. Man, not men.

[-Here-]

{+Here,+} on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall
build our new land and our fort. And it will become as the heart
of the earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating
louder each day. And word of it will reach every corner of the
earth. And the roads of the world will become as veins which will
carry the best of the world's blood to my threshold. And all my
brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but
they will be impotent against me. And the day will come when I
shall break [-all-] the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the
enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where
each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

For the coming of that day [-shall-] I {+shall+} fight, I and my sons and my
chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his
life. For his honor.

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone
the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which
will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can
never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the
meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:

EGO

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate.   Summary Equality 7-2521 tells us that he has discovered the word "I" while reading the books in his library. The discovery moves him to tremendous elation and pity for mankind. After he has read for some time, he calls the Golden One to him and tells her about what he has found. She listens and then tells him she loves him. He then decides that they each need a new name. He names himself Prometheus, and he names her Gaea. She accepts her name without comment. Equality 7-2521 concludes that the Transgressor of the Unspeakable Word, whom he saw burned at the stake in his youth, chose him as his heir to carry on his crusade after he was gone. He resolves to live in his new home and kill and raise his own food and learn the secrets of the Unmentionable Times from the books in the house. He will rebuild the world that has disintegrated at the hands of the collectivists because he is not shackled to the weakest of his society. He will build a fence of wires around his house so that no one from his old city can come onto his property unless he chooses to allow them. The Golden One becomes pregnant, and Equality 7-2521 resolves that his son will be raised as a real man who takes pride in his own existence. He will work to get his house into working order and his land planted, and when he has succeeded in renovating and restoring his home, he will go back to the city and gather the few people, including his friend International 4-8818, whose spirits have not been broken by society. He will bring them up to his home to begin a new race. Equality 7-2521 meditates on human history. He says that man was first enslaved by the gods, but that he broke free from the gods. Man was then enslaved by kings, but he revolted from the kings. He was then enslaved by his birth, kin, and race, and he broke free from all these things. He declared himself to have naturally endowed rights of which he could not be deprived. Equality 7-2521 wonders about everything that men have lost in the name of collectivism and why men could not see their demise coming. He concludes that there must have been some men who did see it coming and suffered great agonies during the fall, and he wishes he had a way to tell them across time that their hope is not forever lost. He concludes that man's spirit will always prevail over the evils of collectivism, though it may take time. He resolves that he will bring back the lost world for the sake of man's freedom, rights, life, and honor. Even if his new race fails, its members' sense of individualism will never die because these members are united under the most important word in human history: "ego."

The renaming of the Golden One and Equality 7-2521 signals their complete transformation from the social creatures they are early on in Anthem into the free individuals they now are. Prometheus, the name Equality 7-2521 chooses for himself, was a Greek man who crept up to Olympus, the home of the gods, and stole fire from them. He brought the fire back down to humans, enabling them to cook and have light at nighttime. Equality 7-2521 chooses the name Prometheus for himself in part as a reference to his inventing the lightbulb and in part because he believes he will bring a new philosophy of individualism to the earth. Gaea, whose name Equality 7-2521 gives to the Golden One, was the Greek mother earth, who gave birth to the other gods and goddesses as well as to the sky and the sea. He chooses this name for her because she will, in his belief, give birth to a race of gods to rule the earth. Feminists object to the naming of the Golden One, who has now been named twice by her mate, and who apparently has no independent sense of self-worth. Moreover, the name Gaea promotes her as the mother of the new race but essentially makes of her nothing more than a vessel for Equality 7-2521's offspring. Rand might argue, however, that the Golden One is an active participant in the new world and that her part is to make the world beautiful and to endow her children with a sense of individualism. The characters' assumption of new names signifies that their break with society, which begins with the presentation of the lightbulb to the World Council of Scholars, is now complete and final. Critics of Rand's philosophy take issue with Equality 7-2521's winner-takes-all attitude and apparent dreams of world domination. They take issue with the fact that he co-opts the home in the forest without knowing to whom it belongs and then immediately cordons it off as his own. Furthermore, they say, Rand's championing of a new race of man has particularly sinister connotations given that Anthem was published in the United States on the heels of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's defeat during World War II. Given that Hitler too advocated the founding of a superior race of men, specifically by killing off those he believed were weighing society down, Anthem's appearance was particularly ill-timed. Rand's advocates, however, would point out that she is declaring the supremacy of human rights and that she believes each man is endowed with them. They would argue further that Rand stands in direct opposition to the kind of authoritarian oppression manifest in Hitler's Nazi regime because it deprives men of the chance to participate in the world as human beings with natural rights and a sense of their own worth. No one, they would say, should be deprived of his or her rights or life in the name of the collective society. Rand sends a message to her contemporaries fighting for individualism with Equality 7-2521's remarks that he wishes he could carry a message to those past generations that suffered during the transition period. Since Rand sees her own time as the transition from the glory of individualism, represented by the United States in the 1890s and 1920s, to the age of collectivism, represented by Russia starting around 1917, she wants both to warn those who believe in collectivism about its dangers and to bolster those who are still holding up the resistance in the name of the individual. For this reason, her hero speaks directly to those crusaders for the ego and tells them that no matter how bleak things may look, the individual will survive, and with him, the possibility of rebirth. The political nature of Anthem comes through most clearly in this last section too in which Rand lays out her plan to bring back the individual and encourages those who are helping her do so. In this way, she herself is acting as a sort of political prophet, ushering in the new age that she describes through Equality 7-2521's vision, and this prophesying proves the driving force of the whole novella.


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....

As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing. The villagers, being afoot, were
the first to climb the slope to the main street, while the country
neighbours packed themselves more slowly into the sleighs under the
shed.

"Ain't you riding, Mattie?" a woman's voice called back from the throng
about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump. From where he stood he
could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced
a few steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-door; but through its
cracks he heard a clear voice answer: "Mercy no! Not on such a night."

She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In another
moment she would step forth into the night, and his eyes, accustomed
to the obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though she stood in
daylight. A wave of shyness pulled him back into the dark angle of the
wall, and he stood there in silence instead of making his presence known
to her. It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from
the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing
him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and
freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days,
when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a picnic.

He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of
him. She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she stood looking
uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show himself.
Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their
formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.

"Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that's tough! No, I
wouldn't be mean enough to tell the other girls. I ain't as low-down as
that." (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) "But look at here, ain't it
lucky I got the old man's cutter down there waiting for us?"

Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: "What on earth's your
father's cutter doin' down there?"

"Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I kinder
knew I'd want to take a ride to-night," Eady, in his triumph, tried to
put a sentimental note into his bragging voice.

The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf
irresolutely about her fingers. Not for the world would he have made
a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next
gesture.

"Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt," Denis called to her,
springing toward the shed.

She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of tranquil
expectancy torturing to the hidden watcher. Frome noticed that she no
longer turned her head from side to side, as though peering through the
night for another figure. She let Denis Eady lead out the horse, climb
into the cutter and fling back the bearskin to make room for her at his
side; then, with a swift motion of flight, she turned about and darted
up the slope toward the front of the church.

"Good-bye! Hope you'll have a lovely ride!" she called back to him over
her shoulder.

Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly abreast
of her retreating figure.

"Come along! Get in quick! It's as slippery as thunder on this turn," he
cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her.

She laughed back at him: "Good-night! I'm not getting in."

By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could only
follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they continued
to move along the crest of the slope above him. He saw Eady, after a
moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl with the reins over
one arm. The other he tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him
nimbly, and Frome's heart, which had swung out over a black void,
trembled back to safety. A moment later he heard the jingle of departing
sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty
expanse of snow before the church.

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she
turned with a quick "Oh!"

"Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?" he asked with sheepish glee.

She answered seriously: "I thought maybe you couldn't come back for me."

"Couldn't? What on earth could stop me?"

"I knew Zeena wasn't feeling any too good to-day."

"Oh, she's in bed long ago." He paused, a question struggling in him.
"Then you meant to walk home all alone?"

"Oh, I ain't afraid!" she laughed.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world
glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars. He brought his
question out.

"If you thought I hadn't come, why didn't you ride back with Denis
Eady?"

"Why, where were you? How did you know? I never saw you!"

Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw.
Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and ingenious. To
prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in
a growl of rapture: "Come along."

He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was
faintly pressed against her side, but neither of them moved. It was so
dark under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her head
beside his shoulder. He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it against
her scarf. He would have liked to stand there with her all night in the
blackness. She moved forward a step or two and then paused again above
the dip of the Corbury road. Its icy slope, scored by innumerable
runners, looked like a mirror scratched by travellers at an inn.

"There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set," she said.

"Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?" he asked.

"Oh, would you, Ethan? It would be lovely!"

"We'll come to-morrow if there's a moon."

She lingered, pressing closer to his side. "Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum
came just as near running into the big elm at the bottom. We were all
sure they were killed." Her shiver ran down his arm. "Wouldn't it have
been too awful? They're so happy!"

"Oh, Ned ain't much at steering. I guess I can take you down all right!"
he said disdainfully.

He was aware that he was "talking big," like Denis Eady; but his
reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the inflection with which she
had said of the engaged couple "They're so happy!" made the words sound
as if she had been thinking of herself and him.

"The elm is dangerous, though. It ought to be cut down," she insisted.

"Would you be afraid of it, with me?"

"I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back, almost
indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step.

These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The
motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the
branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus
provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance
to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him,
and feared; now he was sure she did not, and despaired. To-night the
pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the scale drooping toward
despair, and her indifference was the more chilling after the flush of
joy into which she had plunged him by dismissing Denis Eady. He mounted
School House Hill at her side and walked on in silence till they
reached the lane leading to the saw-mill; then the need of some definite
assurance grew too strong for him.

"You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to have that last
reel with Denis," he brought out awkwardly. He could not pronounce the
name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.

"Why, Ethan, how could I tell you were there?"

"I suppose what folks say is true," he jerked out at her, instead of
answering.

She stopped short, and he felt, in the darkness, that her face was
lifted quickly to his. "Why, what do folks say?"

"It's natural enough you should be leaving us" he floundered on,
following his thought.

"Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden
drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeena--ain't suited with me any
more?" she faltered.

Their arms had slipped apart and they stood motionless, each seeking to
distinguish the other's face.

"I know I ain't anything like as smart as I ought to be," she went on,
while he vainly struggled for expression. "There's lots of things a
hired girl could do that come awkward to me still--and I haven't got much
strength in my arms. But if she'd only tell me I'd try. You know she
hardly ever says anything, and sometimes I can see she ain't suited,
and yet I don't know why." She turned on him with a sudden flash of
indignation. "You'd ought to tell me, Ethan Frome--you'd ought to! Unless
you want me to go too--"

Unless he wanted her to go too! The cry was balm to his raw wound. The
iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness. Again he struggled
for the all-expressive word, and again, his arm in hers, found only a
deep "Come along."

They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded
lane, where Ethan's sawmill gloomed through the night, and out again
into the comparative clearness of the fields. On the farther side of the
hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely
under the stars. Sometimes their way led them under the shade of an
overhanging bank or through the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless
trees. Here and there a farmhouse stood far back among the fields, mute
and cold as a grave-stone. The night was so still that they heard the
frozen snow crackle under their feet. The crash of a loaded branch
falling far off in the woods reverberated like a musket-shot, and once a
fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her steps.

At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as they
drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his words.

"Then you don't want to leave us, Matt?"

He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper: "Where'd I go, if
I did?"

The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy.
He forgot what else he had meant to say and pressed her against him so
closely that he seemed to feel her warmth in his veins.

"You ain't crying are you, Matt?"

"No, of course I'm not," she quavered.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where,
enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles
through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet
company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom.
"We never got away--how should you?" seemed to be written on every
headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a
shiver: "I shall just go on living here till I join them." But now all
desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure
gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability.

"I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though even the
dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by
the graves, he thought: "We'll always go on living here together, and
some day she'll lie there beside me."

He let the vision possess him as they climbed the hill to the house.
He was never so happy with her as when he abandoned himself to these
dreams. Half-way up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen
obstruction and clutched his sleeve to steady herself. The wave of
warmth that went through him was like the prolongation of his vision.
For the first time he stole his arm about her, and she did not resist.
They walked on as if they were floating on a summer stream.

Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the
shutterless windows of the house were dark. A dead cucumber-vine dangled
from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and
the thought flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was there for Zeena--"
Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep,
her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...

They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid
gooseberry bushes. It was Zeena's habit, when they came back late from
the village, to leave the key of the kitchen door under the mat. Ethan
stood before the door, his head heavy with dreams, his arm still about
Mattie. "Matt--" he began, not knowing what he meant to say.

She slipped out of his hold without speaking, and he stooped down and
felt for the key.

"It's not there!" he said, straightening himself with a start.

They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness. Such a
thing had never happened before.

"Maybe she's forgotten it," Mattie said in a tremulous whisper; but both
of them knew that it was not like Zeena to forget.

"It might have fallen off into the snow," Mattie continued, after a
pause during which they had stood intently listening.

"It must have been pushed off, then," he rejoined in the same tone.
Another wild thought tore through him. What if tramps had been
there--what if...

Again he listened, fancying he heard a distant sound in the house; then
he felt in his pocket for a match, and kneeling down, passed its light
slowly over the rough edges of snow about the doorstep.

He was still kneeling when his eyes, on a level with the lower panel of
the door, caught a faint ray beneath it. Who could be stirring in that
silent house? He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant
the thought of tramps tore through him. Then the door opened and he saw
his wife.

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and
angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast,
while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew
out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the
hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and
prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. To
Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came
with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as
if he had never before known what his wife looked like.

She drew aside without speaking, and Mattie and Ethan passed into the
kitchen, which had the deadly chill of a vault after the dry cold of the
night.

"Guess you forgot about us, Zeena," Ethan joked, stamping the snow from
his boots.

"No. I just felt so mean I couldn't sleep."

Mattie came forward, unwinding her wraps, the colour of the cherry scarf
in her fresh lips and cheeks. "I'm so sorry, Zeena! Isn't there anything
I can do?"

"No; there's nothing." Zeena turned away from her. "You might 'a' shook
off that snow outside," she said to her husband.

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

Ethan paused also, affecting to fumble for the peg on which he hung his
coat and cap. The doors of the two bedrooms faced each other across the
narrow upper landing, and to-night it was peculiarly repugnant to him
that Mattie should see him follow Zeena.

"I guess I won't come up yet awhile," he said, turning as if to go back
to the kitchen.

Zeena stopped short and looked at him. "For the land's sake--what you
going to do down here?"

"I've got the mill accounts to go over."

She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp bringing
out with microscopic cruelty the fretful lines of her face.

"At this time o' night? You'll ketch your death. The fire's out long
ago."

Without answering he moved away toward the kitchen. As he did so his
glance crossed Mattie's and he fancied that a fugitive warning gleamed
through her lashes. The next moment they sank to her flushed cheeks and
she began to mount the stairs ahead of Zeena.

"That's so. It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with
lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across the
threshold of their room.

There is an author's introduction to Ethan Frome, written by Wharton in 1922. It is included in most editions of the novel. In her introduction Wharton explains how and why she went about writing Ethan Frome: in her experience of literature set in rural New England, she had seen little that resembled the land as she saw it. Earlier literary portraits romanticized poverty and left out the harshness of the land, overlooking the "outcropping granite" . Wharton also explains her scheme for the novel: a sophisticated first-person narrator collects the different parts of the tale from various sources, after which he presents a unified vision of the story. "I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story." Ethan Frome is framed by a first-person narrator who did not witness any of the events of Ethan Frome's story. The unnamed narrator is an outsider, who came to know Frome while working for a local power plant and staying in the harsh rural town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The narrator sees Ethan Frome by chance outside the Starkfield post office, and Frome immediately makes a great impression on him. Frome is extremely tall, and he has been lame ever since an accident twenty-four years ago. His face is grizzled, perpetually locked into a harsh expression. Though he seems to have an easy power in his body, when the narrator sees him he knows he is looking at the "ruin of a man." Fascinated by Frome, the narrator tries to find out more about him. His first source of information is the stage driver, Harmon Gow. From Harmon, the narrator gathers that Frome has never been able to leave Starkfield; although "most of the smart ones get away" , Ethan has been stuck in Starkfield since youth. At the Frome farm, there has always been someone to care for. First there were Ethan's parents, and then his wife, and then there was "the smash-up." Harmon tells the narrator some of Frome's story, but the narrator senses that "the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps" . The narrator reflects that he quickly learned the harshness of Starkfield life. The winter he stayed in Starkfield, he was working on a job at the Corbury Junction power house. He stayed in Starkfield because it was the nearest inhabitable place. Although he initially felt invigorated by the clear blue skies and shocking white of the snow-covered land, when he saw the periods of blue sky and glittering snow followed by weeks of cold and darkness he began to understand the numbed character of the people, the "deadness of the community" . The narrator lodges with a widow named Mrs. Ned Hale, the daughter of the previous generation's town lawyer. Lawyer Varnum's house is the grandest home in town, but the house has a careworn feel to it; clearly, the family has fallen on more meager times. Nightly, the narrator listens to the old widow talk about Starkfield and its people, but on the subject of Ethan Frome she is oddly silent. Denis Eady, the rich local grocer, provides for the narrator's daily transportation to Corbury Flats, where he catches the train to Corbury Junction for work. When Eady's horses fall ill, Harmon Gow suggests that the narrator hire Ethan Frome. Times are hard for the Frome farm, and Frome could use the extra money. So for a brief period, every morning Frome arrives with his horse-drawn sleigh to drive the narrator to the Flats. Frome is very taciturn, usually responding only minimally to the narrator's questions. One day, the narrator leaves a book on biochemistry in the sleigh by accident. When Frome picks him up later that day, the narrator sees the book in Frome's hands. Frome is fascinated by the book, as well as humbled: "There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word about" . The narrator lends the book to Frome, touched by the contrast between Frome's curiosity and the limitations of his environment. After Frome has been driving the narrator for a week, an incredibly blizzard disables the railroad lines. Ethan Frome arrives as always, offering to take the narrator all the way to Corbury Junction: a good ten miles. Amazed by the generosity of the offer, the narrator accepts. On the way home later that day, the snowfall becomes stronger. The going gets quite rough, until it becomes clear that making it all the way back to town is impossible. Frome's home is on the way. He offers to put the narrator up for the night. The narrator tells us, "It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story" .

For readers who only know Wharton through her finely crafted novels-of-manners, such as The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth, the spare and simple style of Ethan Frome may come as a surprise. Wharton is modifying her style to suit her subject: this is not a novel of manners set in New York's upper social circles, but a short novel about a doomed love affair in rural New England. Wharton may have had some anxiety about the distance between herself and her subject matter in Ethan Frome. She was no farm girl, and her own upbringing had been in the privileged world of New York aristocrats. Acknowledgment of the difference may explain the layers she places between the reader and the story. The narrator, like Wharton, is a man of greater means and education than the people of Starkfield. Although readers may find his descriptions of the townspeople occasionally condescending, the narrator's honest criticism of the rural world is a reaction against novels that romanticize rural people and settings. In Ethan Frome, there is honest and direct acknowledgment of the gap between townspeople and narrator in privilege, education, and sophistication. In his distance from the rural world, we can assume that the narrator acts not only as Wharton's double but also as our own. He is our guide into the town of Starkfield, which is probably a world quite different from the world of the novel's readers. Having already inserted the fictional narrator between the reader and the story, she also makes the narrator a second-hand witness of the events. He has seen nothing of Frome's story. Nor has he gotten a complete account: he acknowledges, before we begin Chapter 1, that the following is a "vision" of Frome's story. Wharton does not attempt to sell her work as journalism, or documentary-style fiction. She is admitting to the distance between herself, the reader, and the story and world of Ethan Frome. In acknowledging the distance, she frees herself to use imagination as the means for getting to the heart of Frome's story. This is a "vision" of Frome's tragedy, which will communicate the parts of the story that Wharton finds most compelling. Some of the novel's themes are set up in this brief opening. The connection between the land and the people is a recurring theme of the novel. The narrator, an outsider, expresses dismay at the incredible harshness of the Starkfield winters. The name of the town is symbolic of the character of the land and its people. This is not a bountiful or generous land. A living must be scraped from the soil. Frome's own farm mirrors the name of the town, as his nearly barren soil provides barely enough for his family's survival. To say that a man or woman has spent "one too many winters in Starkfield" has become a grim town joke, and after the narrator experiences the darkness of the winters he understands why. The harshness and power of the land are mirrored by Ethan Frome, whose body still exudes strength despite its lameness. But he is a "ruin of a man," and his face shows how much he has suffered. Isolation is another important theme. Rural New England in winter is a land under siege, with tiny towns and tinier farms like little islands separated by vast expanses of cold and snow. The isolation is both physical and emotional. The isolation becomes personal for Ethan Frome, whose tragedy has removed him from the other people of Starkfield. The narrator remarks that in a town like Starkfield, people's lives are harsh enough so that they have little time to alleviate the pain and troubles of others. Lost potential is a third theme, closely connected to the two themes listed above. As Starkfield is not a nurturing world, Ethan's curiosity and intellect have had few outlets. His show of lively interest in the biochemistry book is a poignant moment: this fifty-two year-old man, with few practical uses for biochemistry, is brought to life by this book. It hints at Ethan's potential, which will be disclosed in later chapters. The disparity between his intellectual curiosity and the limitations of his environment is painful. Ethan is not only the ruin of the man that he was, but the ruin of the man that he could have been. Determinism is an important theme in this novel and in many of Wharton's other books. Starting with late-nineteenth century American literature, exposure to Darwin and thinkers like Huxley and Spencer began to have a strong influence on American novelists. Naturalism, the school of thought that makes individuals subject to forces of heredity and environment, was a new philosophical force in novels and plays. Individuals have little or no agency, and the environment destroys or nurtures as it sees fit. A person is either made to adapt or made to fail. In Ethan Frome, the influence of this Darwin-inspired outlook is undeniable. Wharton links it to an older form of determinism, the harsh philosophy of New England's old Calvinists, by choosing Starkfield, Massachusetts as her setting. The historical backdrop of Puritanism is for atmosphere rather than for religious instruction; there is little God in Wharton. The environment, which can be natural, cultural, or situational, is the force that decides men's fates. Chapter 1: We are now twenty-some years farther back in the past. Young Ethan Frome walks through the heart of town, passing Eady's new brick store and the grand Varnum house. It is a cold and crisp winter night, and the feeling reminds Frome of a concept he learned from his studies in science. About five years ago, he enrolled in technological courses at a college in Worcester; his father's death ended Ethan's higher education, as Ethan had to return home to care for his mother and the farm. There's a dance in the basement of the Church, and Ethan positions himself by the window so he can see what's going on. He is there to pick up Mattie Silver, the cousin of his wife. He strains to catch a glimpse of Mattie; when he finds her, she is dancing with Denis Eady, the son of the Irish grocer. Ethan feels an intense surge of jealousy when he sees the happiness on Mattie's face and the look of ownership on Eady's. Mattie has lived at the Frome farm for over a year. She came to be the help for Ethan's wife, Zeena; in exchange for her housekeeping, Mattie gets free room and board, but receives no pay. On these nights when she goes for a dance or other social event in town, it is Ethan's job to escort her back. After a hard day of work the extra two miles to and from town is tiring, but Ethan loves the time alone with Mattie. Like him, she is sensitive to natural beauty; in her, he has found someone to talk to about the beauty of the land and the small bits of science he knows. Her vitality invigorates him. He has fallen in love with her. He does not know if Zeena has any inkling of his feelings for Mattie. Zenobia is a sickly, whining woman, but she sometimes surprises Ethan by proving more observant than he'd hoped. She's noticed that since Mattie's coming, Ethan has been shaving every day. She mentioned the change obliquely, surprising Ethan because he had assumed that Zeena was oblivious to everything but her own endless parade of health problems. The first glimpse of Ethan Frome as a young man brings into relief the theme of lost potential. We learn that he began studies but had to cut them short after the death of his father. Poverty's harshness is a recurring theme: because of financial limitations, Ethan had no choice but to return home and care for his mother and the farm. Poverty also brings Mattie Silver to the Frome farm, and after the accident it will force her to stay there. The major events of Ethan's life have not been choices: things have happened to him, and he has been forced to endure them. His isolation on the farm has been relieved by Mattie Silver. She seems to share a love for natural beauty, and Ethan finally has someone with whom he can talk. But Ethan is already married, and this first scene establishes Ethan as one who remains an outsider. We see him in the cold, watching the dance from the outside, looking through a window at happiness he does not share. His poverty, circumstances, and sensitive disposition have left him isolated. His marriage is a loveless match with a sick and whining woman. Illicit and frustrated passion is an important theme. Ethan's feelings can find few outlets. He looks forward to his rare walks with Mattie from town; he shaves every day; he watches Mattie through a window. But as he sees her dancing with Denis Eady, he realizes how difficult his situation is. Wharton gives us no clue about her feelings for Ethan, so we are made to feel as clueless as he. Wharton also creates a feeling of loss and transience. Many of the landmarks we saw in the narrator's opening are here. The difference is that in Frome's youth the buildings are new and handsome, whereas by the time the narrator sees them they are old and faded. The fine mansion of the Varnums is mentioned prominently, as is the new brick store opened by Denis Eady's father. The first-person narrator of the opening mentioned these building in passing, and now the third-person narrator of Chapter 1 mentions them again. The tone is much more sensual in Chapter 1: there is a sense of the town as a living place, with smells and colors described evocatively. But we are looking at the past, and it is a far cry from the dead world the narrator of the opening shows us. The effect is a very bleak portrayal of the relationship between a small town and the passage of time. In a big city, old buildings become historic, or they are replaced by new buildings. In Starkfield, old buildings simply fall into disrepair. Family fortunes dwindle, and men like Ethan Frome fade and deteriorate as slowly and certainly as the buildings of their immediate environment. Chapter 2: As the dancers leave the Church basement, Frome hides behind the storm door. He sees Mattie waiting for him, but he is suddenly overcome with nervousness and shyness. As he watches, Denis Eady flirts with Mattie and invites her to take a ride on his sleigh; Frome cannot bring himself to interfere. Mattie seems to consider the offer, but she breaks away from Eady and tells him that she can't ride with him. When he insists, she rebuffs him more firmly, and sets off as if she's going to walk back to the Frome farm alone. Ethan catches up with her, content that Mattie didn't go with Denis Eady. The link arms and take the long walk home. As they pass one of the town's best sledding hills, they talk about the possibility of "coasting" some night when the moon is bright. Mattie mentions a sledding couple that nearly killed themselves on the big elm at the bottom of the hill; Ethan promises that she would be safe with him steering. Ethan can't help but point out that she lingered after the dance. He says that he supposes that what people say is true: she'll be leaving the Frome farm before long. Mattie seems distressed by the idea, and her distress makes Ethan happy. Apparently, the idea of her leaving upsets her as much as it upsets him. They pass the Frome graveyard, and Ethan feels that the graves offer a promise of stability. Before, the graves always seemed to mock his desire to leave Starkfield. Near the end of the walk, Mattie stumbles and Ethan draws his arm up around her for support. It's the first time they've had contact so close, and they remain linked this way until the reach the door of the house. Usually, Zeena leaves the key for them under the mat. But the key isn't there, and Ethan worries that something has happened. He hears noises inside the house, and the door opens . . . revealing Zeena. She says that she felt too ill to sleep. After the happiness of the walk with Mattie, seeing Zeena is like the abrupt end of a pleasant dream: she is harsh, angular, flat-chested, with a mouth of false teeth. The lamplight exposes every crevasse of her harsh face. Tonight, Ethan dislikes the idea of Mattie seeing him go up to bed with his wife; he tries to invent some excuse for staying downstairs for a bit longer, but with the fire already out this behavior seems strange. After Zeena's surprise at his suggestion, as well as what seems to be a warning glance from Mattie, Ethan gives in and goes upstairs with his wife. Wharton shows the difficulties of repressed and illicit passion, passion without any possible outlet. Ethan fears that Mattie might know how he feels, but he also despairs of her not knowing. He cannot bring himself to interrupt her interaction with Denis Eady: he waits for her to make a decision, even though the thought of her riding with Denis makes Ethan miserable. On the way home, he is constantly playing little games, trying to get some hint of how she feels about him. But because he is married, this is not a normal courtship. It is courtship without any possible goal. Frome cannot imagine life without Mattie, but he also cannot find any way to be with her. Ethan Frome has very little agency. We see him here passively waiting for Mattie to make a decision about the sleigh ride with Denis Eady; on the walk home, we see him try to learn Mattie's feelings, knowing full well that there is little he can do no matter how she feels. The cemetery has always mocked his desire for freedom: it is full of Fromes who never escaped from Starkfield, and Ethan used to feel that the graves promised him the same fate. Tonight, he feels content with the idea that he and Mattie might stay at the farm together forever, but his fantasies are untenable. A real life wouldn't be possible with Zeena around. His wish for Mattie to stay forever will ironically be fulfilled. This chapter is full of foreshadowing of the tragic fate awaiting Ethan and Mattie: note the discussion about sledding, in which Mattie mentions the couple that nearly had a terrible accident on the big elm tree at the bottom of the hill. Ethan swaggers, promising that he would be able to steer, but an observant reader will remember that the "smash-up" that will change Ethan's life is going to happen on that very hill.

As Chapter 1 begins, Ethan is going into town to walk Mattie Silver home from a dance at the church. Instead of going into the church, Ethan hides in the shadows near a window and watches Mattie dance with Denis Eady. His jealousy prompts Ethan to recall some of the qualities that make Mattie precious to him. He also acknowledges his fear that Mattie has no real affection for him and that Zeena will uncover his growing love for Mattie. This train of thought is triggered by the sight of Mattie treating Eady to some of the mannerisms and affectations that Ethan thought she reserved for him alone. Ethan thinks about Zeena's "sickly" nature and suspects that she feigns part of her illness. He remembers the morning when Zeena observed him shaving and he realized that Zeena is aware of everything that goes on around her -- in spite of her illnesses. Feeling shy because of his recollections of Zeena and his reaction to Mattie's attentions to Eady, Ethan decides to test Mattie and see if she will ride home with Eady. Mattie refuses Eady and as she goes off alone to walk home, Ethan catches up with her. He feels happy by what he perceives as her choice of him over Eady. The couple stops for a moment above the Corbury hill as Mattie tells Ethan about Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum's brush with death as their sled almost hit the elm tree on its downhill run. Because Ethan is insecure, he intimates that Mattie will be leaving the Fromes' house to marry Eady. Mattie interprets Ethan's comment about the fact that she might want to marry Eady to mean that Zeena wants her gone. She apologizes for her inadequacies as a houseworker, and asks Ethan to clarify what he means. Ethan, however, is unable to communicate his true feelings. Approaching the farmhouse, Ethan is reassured that Mattie will not marry Eady. He walks arm in arm with her and when she stumbles, uses the opportunity to put his arm around her. When they reach the back door, they cannot find the door key that Zeena always leaves for them. As Ethan searches for the key in the snow, he sees light under the door and Zeena opens it. She hadn't put the key out because she was up; she felt "so mean" she could not sleep. After scolding Ethan and Mattie about the snow on their boots, Zeena starts to go off to bed; Ethan does not want to follow her upstairs to their bedroom but thinks he sees Mattie blink him a warning, so he gives in to his wife and goes to bed.

Chapter 1 begins the main story of Ethan Frome, which takes place about twenty-four years earlier than the prologue and epilogue and describes the three and a half days before and including the "smash-up" . Wharton shifts the point of view in this chapter from the first person to the limited omniscient point of view. The limited omniscient point of view allows Wharton to relate the thoughts and feelings of only one character. In Ethan Frome, Wharton relates the thoughts and feelings of Ethan. As the story opens, Wharton continues the imagery and symbolism of the winter setting in Starkfield. The first paragraph describes the winter night when Ethan walks into town to meet Mattie at the church. It is windy, and there is two feet of snow on the ground; the stars shine like icicles and Orion seems to be a "cold fire."  Wharton's intention is to emphasize the bitterness and hardness of the winter by describing a star in a "sky of iron." On the walk home, when Mattie assures Ethan that she does not want to leave the Frome household, "the iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness." Wharton uses imagery associated with winter to characterize Zeena, and imagery of spring and summer to represent Mattie. When Ethan reaches the church, he stays in "pure and frosty darkness," analogous to the silence and isolation he experiences and in opposition to the happy sociability of the interior of the church which he sees in "a mist of heat" caused by the "volcanic fires" from the stove in the room. Ethan feels that Mattie's effect on him is like "the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth." Her face seems to him "like a window that has caught the sunset." On their walk home from the church, when Ethan reveals to Mattie that he had been hiding while she talked to Eady, "her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw." Mattie's changes in mood seem to Ethan to be like "the flit of a bird in the branches." And when he finally gets up the courage to put his arm around Mattie, he feels that walking with her is like "floating on a summer stream." In contrast to the warm, summer imagery associated with Mattie is the imagery that represents the cold, isolation, and death of spirit inherent during the winter months and apparently present in the Frome farmhouse. Returning home from the church, Ethan and Mattie see farmhouses that seem to be "mute and cold as a gravestone." They see the dead cucumber vine at the Frome farmhouse that looks "like the crape streamer tied to the door for death." And, the kitchen has "the deadly chill of a vault after the dry cold of the night." These images are related to the fascination that Ethan finds in his family graveyard, and they are also appropriate to the living death that Ethan and Mattie experience after their accident. Their lives become cold and dead and Ethan experiences more intense silence and isolation than he did before Mattie came into his life. Wharton reveals important aspects of Ethan's character and introduces readers to Zeena and Mattie. Ethan is an intelligent man; he spent time at a technological college, but had to quit and return home when his father died. His schooling "made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things." Ethan learned that he has the freedom to think and his thoughts have become his world and his life. He retreats into his thoughts to avoid the pain of reality. Ethan's thoughts are sometimes imprecise and irrational -- they too often consist of illusions or half-truths rather than clear intuitions or reasoned conclusions. Ethan constantly tries to analyze and control what is happening in the present and dreams and wonders about the future. Wharton introduces Mattie through Ethan's thoughts while he is waiting for her by the church window. Mattie is first identified as Zeena's cousin, who has come to Starkfield as a household helper, and is allowed to go into town from the farm to attend social activities. According to Ethan's perspective, Mattie is the happy opposite of the cold and complaining Zeena. The tense silence and isolation that dominates Ethan's marriage to Zeena is not present in his relationship with Mattie. In contrast to Zeena, Mattie has a sensitive nature and is able to communicate with Ethan and Ethan with her. Mattie shares his appreciation of natural beauty. When Mattie exclaims that a sunset looks "just as if it was painted," Ethan feels as though he has found his soul mate. As a result of his secret feelings for Mattie, Ethan often tries to escape the reality of his marriage by indulging in self-illusion, or fantasies. As Ethan continues to watch Mattie from outside the window of the church, he feels fearful because Eady is flirting with Mattie. The fears that Ethan forces on himself are an example of his use of self-illusion as an escape. In his mind, Mattie's smiles and gestures have been just for him. Ethan's unhappy thoughts turn to thoughts of Zeena. Wharton characterizes Zeena as "sickly." Ethan is suspicious of how sick she really is, suspecting that she may be feigning part of her illness. Ethan's memory of the morning when Zeena watched him shaving serves to foreshadow her character and physical appearance before her dramatic appearance on the Frome back porch: she has a gray complexion, high cheek bones, and a drawling voice. Zeena's vindictive nature casts a pall of dominance over Ethan and Mattie throughout the novel. As Mattie and Ethan walk home, Wharton emphasizes the difficulty Ethan has in communicating with Mattie. He is unable to express his affection in words or action. When provided the opportunity to reveal his feelings to Mattie, he can only say, "Come along." The isolation and silence that Ethan experiences , have become barriers that inhibit him. Because Ethan is incapable of telling Mattie that he loves her, he "attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone." He needs her approval to fuel his romantic illusions. Ethan's insecurity causes him to intimate that her rejection of him is because she intends to marry Eady and leave the Frome farm. Ethan's love for Mattie as yet remains one-sided and is fed on illusion. The closest Ethan can come to telling Mattie how he feels is to pull her to him and whisper that they will always be together. Ironically, they are passing the graveyard as he pronounces these words, and Wharton foreshadows their death in life. Mattie tells Ethan about Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum's brush with death when their sled almost hit the elm tree as it was going downhill. This couple serves as a symbol for Ethan and Mattie of the happiness that they might have, and Ethan bases some of his illusions about himself and Mattie on Ned and Ruth's actions. This description of Ned and Ruth's near accident on Corbury hill, plus an earlier mention of Corbury hill and sledding, foreshadows Ethan and Mattie's smash-up. As Ethan and Mattie near the farmhouse, Ethan sees the dead cucumber vine that reminds him of a funeral crape. He half wishes it were there for Zeena: Ethan subconsciously wishes she were dead. He has the same thought when he cannot find the back-door key and thinks that tramps might have broken into the house. Wharton hints at Zeena's sickness and disagreeable nature and describes various unattractive physical characteristics. When Zeena opens the back door, Ethan really sees her for the first time. Wharton's description of Zeena emphasizes the hard and cold nature of the woman. She is "tall and angular," with a "flat breast," "puckered throat," and "projecting wrist." She is the ugly reality from which Ethan is trying to escape in his dreams of Mattie. Zeena has felt "so mean" she could not sleep. In colloquial usage the words denote that she felt ill, but there is an ironic connotation of Zeena's vindictiveness intended as well. It appears that Zeena wields some kind of power over Ethan. When Ethan realized, years ago, that he could not communicate with her, he became acquiescent. In this situation, he gives in to his wife, and with Mattie's warning look, goes to bed. Glossary Dipper the Big Dipper; a dipper-shaped group of stars in the constellation Ursa Major Orion an equatorial constellation between Taurus and Lepus, containing the bright stars Rigel and Betelgeuse peristyle a row of columns forming an enclosure or supporting a roof declivity a downward slope or sloping, as of a hill vexed to give trouble to, esp. in a petty or nagging way; disturb, annoy, irritate, etc. effrontery unashamed boldness; impudence; audacity; presumption revelry reveling; noisy merrymaking; boisterous festivity Aldebaran a galactic cluster Pleiades a galactic cluster in the constellation Taurus fatuity stupidity, especially complacent stupidity; smug foolishness self-effacement the practice of keeping oneself in the background and minimizing one's own actions; modest, retiring behavior roan of a solid color, as reddish-brown, brown, black, etc., with a thick sprinkling of white hairs; said chiefly of horses rills little brooks; rivulets crape streamer a piece of black crepe as a sign of mourning, often worn as a band around the arm repugnant contradictory; inconsistent; offering resistance; opposed; antagonistic