"Ain't you got them dishes done up yet, Irma?"
A petulant voice from what, in Central New England, is called the
"sittin' room," penetrated the cool silence of the farm-house kitchen.
Irma Hathaway passed her hand heavily before her eyes.
"Yes, Ma," she replied wearily, as she threw a cup at the steel
engraving of "The Return of the Mayflower" which hung on the kitchen
wall. She wondered when she would die.
A cold wind blew along the corridor which connected the kitchen with
the wood-shed. Then, as if disgruntled, it blew back again, like a man
returning to his room after a fresh handkerchief. Irma shuddered. It
was all so inexplicably depressing.
For eighteen years the sun had never been able to shine in Bemis
Corners. God knows it had tried. But there had always been something
imponderable, something monstrously bleak, which had thrown itself,
like a great cloak, between the warm light of that body and the grim
reality of Bemis Corners.
"If Eben had only known," thought Irma, and buried her face in the
soapy water.
Some one entered the room from the wood-shed, stamping the snow from
his boots. She knew, without looking up, that it was Ira.
"Why hev you come?" she said softly, lifting her moist eyes to him. It
was not Ira. It was the hired man. She sobbed pitifully and leaped
upon the roller-towel which hung on the door, pulling it round and
round like a captive squirrel in a revolving cage.
"It ain't no use," she moaned.
And, through the cadavers of the apple-trees in the orchard behind the
house, there rattled a wind from the sea, the sea to which men go down
in ships never to return, telling of sorrow and all that sort of
thing.
"Fate," some people call it.
To Irma Hathaway it was all the same.