Tomorrow Is Forever by Gwen Bristow

Arthur was dead, she had to get through the time without him, and she hoped she could do so without being too much of a nuisance to anybody.
    Several weeks after the end of the war she received a tactfully worded letter from the Red Cross, telling her that Arthur had died in a German field hospital. There were some gentle phrases about how the stretcher-bearers paid no attention to international differences in their errands of mercy. Before she had read halfway down the page Elizabeth recognized it as a form letter composed by some expert writer to soften the regret that would be felt by recipients on learning that their loved ones had had to spend their last hours among foreigners. It was very kind of them, no doubt, to have gone to the trouble of getting up such a pretty letter, but neither this nor any other literature could help her. She tore the sheet of paper into small pieces and let them dribble out of her hand into the wastebasket.
    By this time it was as if her single great pain had changed into a thousand small ones striking her with swift short anguish, each in a different place from the one before. Earlier, there had been no details. Now whatever she saw, every object she touched, stabbed her with its own small blade of memory. She could not pick up a table-napkin without remembering what fun she and Arthur had had choosing the linens for their home. Every time she opened the china-closet she could hear their secret laughter as they garnished the top shelf with the atrocities some of their relatives had thrust on them as wedding presents. If she looked out of a front window she could almost see Arthur coming down the street from his office and raising his head to see if he could catch sight of her anywhere and wave at her before he came into the house. Arthur was everywhere, so vividly that there were even moments when she forgot he would not be there any more. She would wake up in the night and begin to turn over softly so as not to disturb him; sometimes if the library door was closed she would find herself tiptoeing past it, lest the sound of her approach interrupt the work he had brought home to do. When this happened she would bring herself up with a start that reminded her, “But he isn’t there, he’ll never be there again.” The pain would slash into her, deep and quick, until she thought, “This is worse than it was at first. And there’ll never be anything else. Arthur is dead .”
    She did not make any display of her grief. This was partly because she had an inborn dread of public weeping, but mainly because it did not occur to her to do so. What she and Arthur had shared had been too profound for them ever to talk about it except to each other. Now it would have seemed sacrilegious and obscene to try to tell anybody else what he had meant to her. Arthur had been her husband; no matter how much his friends valued him, he did not stand in that relationship to anyone but herself, and only she could feel the severing of that tie. So she bore what she had to bear alone and in silence.
    It was a matter of embarrassing astonishment to her Aunt Grace. Aunt Grace was very fond of Uncle Clarence, and would have been deeply distressed to lose him, so when Elizabeth said nothing whatever about Arthur, Aunt Grace was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that Elizabeth had no soul. To Aunt Grace one’s soul meant the sum of one’s emotions, and to her an emotion was synonymous with its expression. When she was happy she laughed, when she was unhappy she cried, if she liked you she kissed you and if she was angry with you she lost her temper. Regarding these manifestations as identical with the states of mind that inspired them, when she observed that Elizabeth expressed nothing she concluded that Elizabeth felt nothing, and therefore had no soul.
    Elizabeth took no interest in her aunt’s reactions, nor, for that matter, in anything else. Her friends were being very kind to