The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Read Free

thing she couldn’t bear to think about. She said: A man’s second choice was made when he knew better what he wanted, when he knew from experience what to steer clear of, when he looked deeper than a pretty face. It was only with a ripeness of years, as everybody knew, that true love came.
    But as he worked he handled more carefully the things that had been Virgie’s, held them longer in his hands as though he hated to give them up. A guilty feeling would come over him and what was it worth if he was gentle with her then? Watching him ponder over a lamp that had been brought out for Virgie all the way from St. Louis, then break off suddenly to come in and pat her head and say a word, she felt she was getting only the crumbs that fell from the table. Such a rush of old feeling for Virgie had risen in him, he would have said a loving word to anybody that stood near.
    Mr. Hardy’s little niceties were the only way he knew how to behave. She couldn’t remember ever having seen him lose his temper. But so with Virgie, too, he must have been sweet and good and kind. She didn’t enjoy thinking he had got on exactly badly with his first wife. In her own sure ways she had made life easier for him, but it hurt her to think he had ever been really unhappy. She hoped he hadn’t stayed a widower for three years only because his first marriage had been unfortunate.
    Sitting alone a feeling came over her that her whole life had been an accident. What if Virgie hadn’t died? But she did and Mr. Hardy chose her, after looking the field over for a long time.
    Mr. Hardy crossed the silver on his plate and tilted his chair back, feeling he ought to say something. He saw in a corner the pile of things Clara meant to keep from the sale. They had only been over the bottom part of the house and already she could start a rag and bone shop with the stuff she had put aside. He could ransack the rest of it, a suspicion came over Mr. Hardy, and not find in this house a single thing that was really his and his alone. Clara had so many things and got such enjoyment from each of them. He found a sixpence, worn smooth, and a rusty penknife from Sheffield; they were his and they were about all.
    Clara had to stop and reminisce over everything she came across and persuade herself to part with it. If the job was ever to get done they ought to separate for the rest of the day. But he could not trust her to put sensible prices on things. Already he had spent a good half-hour talking her, first into giving it up at all, then out of asking five dollars for an old table that was not worth fifteen cents and ought, in fact, to have been chopped into kindling long ago, but was the one, she maintained, on which she had fixed the first meal she ever made for him. Then, things that were in perfectly good shape, unless they had some memory for her, she was liable to let go for nothing.
    He struck a bargain with her—she could sort the things in the children’s rooms if she would leave the rest of the house to him. How nice it would have been, she sighed, to go around with him and recall old times together as they turned up things, but as he didn’t want her, she agreed. She worked her way up the steps and when she got her breath back, found she could not get up for the load of memories the girls’ room laid on her.
    If there was such a thing as being sorry and glad about something at the same time, thought Mrs. Hardy, she felt that way about leaving the house. Really her life hadn’t been lived at all the way it was meant to be. It was a mistake to spend your life doing the same things day after day and she never got over feeling she was meant for something better, exactly what, she couldn’t say, but she felt she would have been a great one for change, for setting out on new things, traveling. You could change the furniture around every week but it still all had to be dusted.
    The trouble was, when a change happened