moon from any world she understood, in a solitude acidulated by Melora
Meigs. No pictures, no music, no plays, no talk--and this, the whole
year round. Would you like it yourselves, you would-be savages with
Adirondack guides? Books? Well: that was one of life's little
stupidities. She couldn't buy them, and no one knew what to send her.
Besides, books deferred the day when her mind should, ever so little, go
back on her. She didn't encourage gifts of literature. She was no
philosopher; and an abstraction was of no use to her unless she could
turn it to a larger concreteness, somehow enhancing, let us say, a
sunset from the Acropolis. I never loved Kathleen Somers, as men love
women, but many a time that year I would have taken her burden on
myself, changed lives with her, if that had been possible. It never
could have been so bad for any of us as for her. Mildred Thurston would
have gone to the church sociables and flirted as grossly as Hebron
conventions permitted; I, at least, could have chopped wood. But to what
account could Kathleen Somers turn her martyrdom?

Withrow felt it, too--not as I could feel it, for, as I foretold, he
thought the place glorious. He went up in the autumn when everything was
crimson and purple and gold. Yet more, in a sense, than I could feel it,
for he did love her as men love women. It shows you how far gone she was
that she turned him down. Many women, in her case, would have jumped at
Withrow for the sake of getting away. But she was so steeped in her type
that she couldn't. She wouldn't have married him before; and she wasn't
going to marry him for the sake of living in New York. She would have
been ashamed to. A few of us who knew blamed her. I didn't, really,
though I had always suspected that she cared for him personally.
Kathleen Somers's love, when it came, would be a very complicated thing.
She had seen sex in too many countries, watched its brazen play on too
many stages, within theatres and without, to have any mawkish illusions.
But passion would have to bring a large retinue to be accepted where she
was sovereign. Little as I knew her, I knew that. Yet I always thought
she might have taken him, in that flaming October, if he hadn't so
flagrantly, tactlessly liked the place. He drank the autumn like wine;
he was tipsy with it; and his loving her didn't tend to sober him. The
consequence was that she drew away--as if he had been getting drunk on
some foul African brew that was