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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton


72

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

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

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

“I never saw anybody with such sharp eyes!” she answered.
She sat down on the tree-trunk in the sun and he sat down beside
her.

“You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat,” he said.
She laughed with pleasure. “Oh, I guess it was the hat!” she
rejoined.

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

Suddenly she rose to her feet and said: “We mustn’t stay here any
longer.” He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only half-roused
from his dream.

“There’s plenty of time,” he answered.
They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were
straining to absorb and hold fast the other’s image. There were
things he had to say to her before they parted, but he could not say
them in that place of summer memories, and he turned and
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