When the Boston train chuffed in at Woods Hole, as if impatient to start, she boarded it automatically, forgetting her arrival only a few days ago, the meeting with her husband, the silly way she had got off the wrong side of the car and the strain of the boat trip when, more often than not, she was on the verge of tears. The Haumans had then been a pleasant diversion, but only because they had served as a postponement of the crisis due to come up sooner or later. Now, all she remembered of the whole stay in Nantucket, aside from the shattering scene yesterday when she had found Cliff’s service cap in her husband’s bag—and the insulting way he had tried to rationalize it—was that she had never once, no, not once, spoken to him of her pleasure because his book had been accepted for publication in the fall by Scribner’s. What he must have thought of her for completely ignoring this turning point in his life did not matter to her now. Nothing mattered but the tragic fact that, as she believed, she had lost her husband for good.

She did not care what the Howards might be thinking of her sudden departure, what Cliff and Billie might think, or even what her husband thought. She had had to get away; and thank God, she had courage enough to act on her own at last. It had been a cruel abasement to her to have stayed in Sconset as long as she had; to stay longer would have been to vitiate all she had been trying to tell him during that dreadful first night, the gist of which she only understood now for the first time. She wished she could have pitied her husband during his fruitless attempts at “explanation” yesterday; instead, to her horror and despair she had hated him with a real hate. Never before in her life had any man—above all, her husband—reduced her to such a feeling of nothingness. She was nothing to him henceforth, could be nothing ever again, and consequently her pride as a woman was wounded to the quick, her love unneeded, even flouted in her face. What a lucky woman indeed was Sarah Howard who, though Bill lacked John’s intelligence and fineness, was at least loved by her husband. They were in love with the passion of youth; so much so that she could no longer tolerate their presence: it was an oppression to her spirit which, in view of the disillusionment of her marriage, she could not take. As for the Haumans, Billie was a pitiable figure, perhaps, but at least she would learn in time to love the man she had married. Ethel Grandin felt no worry whatever about their future; it was her own future, only, that seemed bleak and without promise.