Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [36]
No caressing in this scene now. Lovers of a kind, cats of a kind, they would have shown their claws. Augusta was incredulous, aghast, and accusatory; Susan stubborn, perhaps just a shade triumphant. You see? I am not defenseless, I am not to be left out after all. There they sat, burning under their serge and bombazine with emotions hotter than gentility could quite allow.
“Oliver Ward? Who on earth is he? Have I met him? You’re joking.”
“No, I’m quite serious. You haven’t met him. He’s been in California.”
“Then where did you meet him?”
“At Emma’s, one New Year’s Eve.”
“And he’s been gone since? How long?”
“Four years, nearly five.”
“But you’ve been writing to him.”
“Yes, regularly.”
“And now he’s proposed and you’ve accepted, all by mail!”
“No, he’s back. He’s been visiting at Milton for a week.”
Augusta, sitting with her head lowered, found a loose thread in the trimming of her gown and pulled it out. Her fingers smoothed the ruffled rickrack braid. Her dark angry eyes touched Susan’s and looked away. “Doesn’t it seem to you odd—it does to me—that you wouldn’t ever have mentioned this man’s name to me?”
“I didn’t know he was going to become so important.”
“But now after a week’s visit you know.”
“I do know, yes. I love him. I’m going to marry him.”
Augusta rose and paced the room, stopped and put the heels of both palms against her temples. “I thought there were no secrets between us.”
Susan could not resist sinking a claw in the carelessly exposed flesh. “Now that there’s something to tell, I am telling you. Just as you told me when there was something to tell about you and Thomas.”
Augusta stared with her hands to her head. “Ah, that’s it!”
Her cheeks hot, Susan held her ground. “No, that’s not it. But just as you have every right to fall in love and marry, so have I. One doesn’t always know—does one?—when things are headed that way.”
Augusta was shaking her head. “I never expected to see you fall in love like a shopgirl with the first handsome stranger.”
“You’re forgetting yourself!”
“Sue, I think you’re forgetting yourself. What does this young man do?”
“He’s an engineer.”
“In California.”
“Yes.”
“And he wants to take you out there.”
“As soon as he finds the right place, with some permanence in it.”
“And you’ll go.”
“When he sends for me, yes.”
Augusta resumed her pacing, throwing her hands outward in little distracted gestures. She straightened a picture on the wall without stopping. She bent her head to gnaw on a knuckle. “What about your art? What about everything we’ve worked for?”
“My art isn’t that important. I’ll never be anything but a commercial illustrator.”
“You know that’s utterly wrongheaded!”
“I know I want to marry him and go where his career takes him. It won’t be forever, but it may take some time. He’s not flashy, he’ll take a little while to establish himself. I can go on drawing. He wants me to.”
“In some mining camp.”
“I don’t know where.”
Now Augusta’s agitation broke out. She stopped, she gripped her hands before her face and shook them. “Susan, Susan, you’re madl You’re throwing yourself away! Ask Thomas. He’d never agree this is right.”
“In this,” said Susan, as if in a novel, “I can consult no one but myself.”
“And make a mistake that will ruin your career and lead you a desolate life.”
“Augusta, you’ve never even met him!”
“And don’t want to. I loathe his very name. He can’t come in and overturn your life like this. What about us?”
They looked, they fell into each other’s arms, they even laughed at the extremity of their disagreement. But though they patched up their difference, they did not change; they were both strong-minded women. Augusta did not abate her disapproval, Susan’s resolution did not weaken. Maybe she was trapped—she had given an impulsive promise, and promises with her were binding. But I think she had been stirred by Oliver Ward’s masculine strength, by his stories of an adventurous life, by his evenness of disposition, by his obvious adoration. I think she was for the first time physically in love with a man, and I like her courage in going where her emotions led her.