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Updated: May 13, 2025
It had become the custom of Everard Barett to go for a stroll the last thing at night, to get a "mouthful of air before turning in," as he said. When, later on this evening, he looked in upon his wife before starting for his walk, he found her standing by the hearth, gazing thoughtfully down into the fire.
Mrs Barett knitted on in silence during the agitated minute in which her husband kicked away the chair on whose seat his feet had been stretched, sat up, punched the cushion behind him three times with a vicious fist, and, finding it even then fail intelligently to support his head, flung it across the room.
"She has her husband, who is devoted to her," Mrs Barett reminded him, disregarding the remark. For answer the man moved impatiently, and angrily slapped one of his slippered feet over the other. She smiled upon her knitting. "I daresay her husband isn't the style of man you admire, but he is devoted to her all the same," she said. "Pappy idiot!" Mr Barett ejaculated.
With that he went, and pulled the door to with a slightly unnecessary emphasis. Everard Barett was the sleeping partner in a large manufacturing firm in that provincial town. He drew his comfortable income from this source, but had very little else to do with the business; and so it was that time hung heavily on his hands.
It must be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett Wendell: it is marked in a high degree by "unity, mass, and coherence."
She was lying back in her chair as if she, herself, were a little tired, and her long white hands busied themselves with four knitting-needles from which depended the leg of a knickerbocker-stocking intended for the shapely limb of Everard Barett. He looked quickly at her with an air of suspicion and offence. "Now?" he repeated. "What does 'now' mean, spoken in that tone?
"I suppose, knowing she was there, and seeing after things saving me bother in giving orders, coming between me and that infernal nurse, and so on was a comfort to you, wasn't it?" Mrs Barett, intent on her knitting, made no reply. His position was strong; he repeated his question: "Wasn't it, I say?" "It was a comfort to you, I suppose," Lucilla said, then. "We will leave it there."
He was mollified by that, and lowered the paper sufficiently to gaze over the top of it into the fire. "It would be rather unfair if you did; and, considering all the little woman did for you when baby was born, a little like ingratitude into the bargain," he said. "You can't have forgotten all she did?" No. She had not forgotten, Mrs Barett admitted.
For pathos, depth of spiritual insight, and magical exercise of a rare power of self-utterance, it will hardly be questioned that she has surpassed every competitor among females white or black save and except Elizabeth Barett Browning, with whom the gifted African stands on much the same plane of poetic excellence.
"If I took her head, and you her feet?" Everard suggested to the doctor a plan at once negatived by Vera. "I won't be carried in that fashion," she said. "I am not a long woman, like Luce," she added. "Fred carries me with perfect ease." "I think you can manage it, Mr Barett," the doctor said. There was no help for it. Everard stooped to the task.
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