Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton Page B

research.’ I waited a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: ‘If you’d like to look the book through I’d be glad to leave it with you.’
    He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, ‘Thank you – I’ll take it,’ he answered shortly.
    I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication between us. Frome was so simple and straightforward that I was sure his curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject. Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs, and I hoped that the chance of giving expression to the latter might at least unseal his lips. But something in his past history, or in his present way of living, had apparently driven him too deeply into himself for any casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. At our next meeting he made no allusion to the book, and our intercourse seemed fated to remain as negative and one-sided as if there had been no break in his reserve.
    Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall. The height of the white waves massed against the garden-fence and along the wall of the church showed that the storm must have been going on all night, and that the drifts were likely to be heavy in the open. I thought it probable that my train would be delayed; but I had to be at the power-house for an hour or two that afternoon, and I decided, if Frome turned up, to push through to the Flats and wait there till my train came in. I don’t know why I put it in the conditional, however, for I never doubted that Frome would appear. He was not the kind of man to be turned from his business by any commotion of the elements; and at the appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze.
    I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude at his keeping his appointment; but I exclaimed in surprise as I saw him turn his horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road.
    ‘The railroad’s blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift below the Flats,’ he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging whiteness.
    ‘But look here – where are you taking me, then?’
    ‘Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way,’ he answered, pointing up School House Hill with his whip.
    ‘To the Junction – in this storm? Why, it’s a good ten miles!’
    ‘The bay’ll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business there this afternoon. I’ll see you get there.’
    He said it so quietly that I could only answer: ‘You’re doing me the biggest kind of a favour.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ he rejoined.
    Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane to the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their trunks by the weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew that the solitary roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of the hill was that of Frome’s saw-mill. It looked exanimate enough, with its idlewheel looming above the black stream dashed with yellow-white spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcropping? of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.
    ‘That’s my place,’ said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his