The Kentons. William Dean Howells
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“Lottie would despise me; and what would Richard say?”
“Richard would never say anything to wound you, dear, and if you don’t despise yourself, you needn’t mind Lottie.”
“But I should, momma; that’s the worst of it! I should despise myself, and he would despise me too. No, if I see him, I am going to do it because I am selfish and wicked, and wish to have my own way, no matter who is harmed by it, or—anything; and I’m not going to have it put on any other ground. I could see him,” she said, as if to herself, “just once more—only once more—and then if I didn’t believe in him, I could start right off to Europe.”
Her mother made no answer to this, and Ellen lay awhile apparently forgetful of her presence, inwardly dramatizing a passionate scene of dismissal between herself and her false lover. She roused herself from the reverie with a long sigh, and her mother said, “Won’t you have some breakfast, now; Ellen?”
“Yes; and I will get up. You needn’t be troubled any more about me, momma. I will write to him not to come, and poppa must go back and get his ticket again.”
“Not unless you are doing this of your own free will, child. I can’t have you feeling that we are putting any pressure upon you.”
“You’re not. I’m doing it of my own will. If it isn’t my free will, that isn’t your fault. I wonder whose fault it is? Mine, or what made me so silly and weak?”
“You are not silly and weak,” said her mother, fondly, and she bent over the girl and would have kissed her, but Ellen averted her face with a piteous “Don’t!” and Mrs. Kenton went out and ordered her breakfast brought back.
She did not go in to make her eat it, as she would have done in the beginning of the girl’s trouble; they had all learned how much better she was for being left to fight her battles with herself singlehanded. Mrs. Kenton waited in the parlor till her husband same in, looking gloomy and tired. He put his hat down and sank into a chair without speaking. “Well?” she said.
“We have got to lose the price of the ticket, if we give it back. I thought I had better talk with you first,” said Kenton, and he explained the situation.
“Then you had better simply have it put off till the next steamer. I have been talking with Ellen, and she doesn’t want to stay. She wants to go.” His wife took advantage of Kenton’s mute amaze (in the nervous vagaries even of the women nearest him a man learns nothing from experience) to put her own interpretation on the case, which, as it was creditable to the girl’s sense and principle, he found acceptable if not imaginable. “And if you will take my advice,” she ended, “you will go quietly back to the steamship office and exchange your ticket for the next steamer, or the one after that, if you can’t get good rooms, and give Ellen time to get over this before she leaves. It will be much better for her to conquer herself than to run away, for that would always give her a feeling of shame, and if she decides before she goes, it will strengthen her pride and self-respect, and there will be less danger—when we come back.”
“Do you think he’s going to keep after her!”
“How can I tell? He will if he thinks it’s to his interest, or he can make anybody miserable by it.”
Kenton said nothing to this, but after a while he suggested, rather timorously, as if it were something he could not expect her to approve, and was himself half ashamed of, “I believe if I do put it off, I’ll run out to Tuskingum before we sail, and look after a little matter of business that I don’t think Dick can attend to so well.”
His wife knew why he wanted to go, and in her own mind she had already decided that if he should ever propose to go, she should not gainsay him. She had, in fact, been rather surprised that he had not proposed it before this, and now she assented, without taxing him with his real motive, and bringing him to open disgrace before her. She even went further in saying: “Very well, then you had better go. I can get on very well here, and I think it will leave Ellen freer to act for herself if you are away. And there are some things in the house that I want, and that Richard would be sure to send his wife to get if I asked him, and I won’t have her rummaging around in my closets. I suppose you will want to go into the house?”
“I suppose so,” said Renton, who had not let a day pass, since he left his house, without spending half his homesick time in it. His wife suffered his affected indifference to go without exposure, and trumped up a commission for him, which would take him intimately into the house.
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