Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt
as he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips
of his mother. The look in Sue’s eyes as she turned them on Frank struck
him like a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception
of her and of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam
the carriage door after her and walk home.
They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new
and strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her
face held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in
front. He didn’t want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm
and shake her. “I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank’s
seat and give her a sound beating,” he told himself.
At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and
when Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the
stairs leading to her room and waiting for him.
“I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
evening,” she cried. “Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?”
Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at
her and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the
door of her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in
the grate and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think
the thing out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the
Sue who had lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed,
that in her place there was this other woman, this woman who had
insulted her own servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of
his talk during the evening.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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