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Updated: June 22, 2025
At lunch, the next day, a day when Penton was called in to Philadelphia on business while Darrie, Ruth, Hildreth and I sat talking together peacefully about our outdoor board, Hildreth suddenly threw a third of a glass of milk on Darrie's shirt-waist front. We were astounded. "Why, Hildreth, what does this mean?" I asked. I want to be let alone." And Hildreth hurried away.
"Yes ... even though Hildreth no longer loves Penton, she's jealous of him ... the fact is, Hildreth doesn't know what she wants." "But Darrie Darrie is her friend?" "Of course ... and remains her friend. Darrie doesn't want Penton. She only pities him." I quoted the line about pity being akin to love ... "they do a lot of strolling together." "Yes.
Though Penton had gone on frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work, chiefly because Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not wanted to accompany them both yet she and I seized on the precedent Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ... roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each other's arms ... praying with devout lover's prayers that we were as unseen as unseeing....
With solemn face he sang high, and always off key, till the three women had to stuff their handkerchiefs in their mouths to keep from laughing at him before his face.... After class, we strolled home by a devious path, through the moonlight. This time Ruth walked ahead with little Dan, Hildreth with her husband, Penton, Darrie with me....
Hildreth smuggled forth her coffee percolator, which she kept hidden from her husband's search ... and we soon, by the aid of an alcohol stove, had a cup of fragrant coffee a-piece ... which Darrie made.... "Penton swears coffee is worse than whiskey, the rankest of poisons. We have to hide the percolator from him." "He lies a-bed late, when he wakes.
Penton came forth from the big house ... he poised tentatively like a queer bird on the verge of a long flight ... then he wavered rapidly down the steps. " slept late!... has the mail come yet?... where's Ruth?" "Isn't she in the house?" I queried. "I saw her stepping out at the back door a minute ago" ... said Darrie. "We had breakfast together ... I...."
It was not so easy to tear her out of his heart, she had intertwined so deeply there ... eight years with a woman, and one child by her, and affection for her was no easy thing to root up from one's being. "I sat there a long while with him in Riverside Park," Darrie reported, "it was chilly and he wore an old overcoat because he couldn't afford a new one. His hair was greying at the temples.
I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being with her.... As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes lines she often quoted "Love leads me on, no end of love appears. Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint? Oh then, how like damnation to be blessed!" I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the morning....
A ripple of pleasant laughter at me from both women. "Johnnie's a dear, innocent boy!" Darrie. "He makes me feel like a mother to him!" said Hildreth. Though each of these remarks was made without the slightest colour of irony, I did not like them ... I lowered my head, humiliated under them.
Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable emotion.... Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin Hildreth. I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that possibly I might see her before I went, but I had an hour till train time. My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.
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