Summer

Summer

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Summer, by Edith Wharton This
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Title: Summer
Author: Edith Wharton
Release Date: March 12, 2006 [EBook #166]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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Produced by Meredith Ricker, John Hamm and David Widger

SUMMER
by Edith Wharton
1917

I
A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of
North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.
It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky
shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the
pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the
round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows
across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street
when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the
open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England
villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the
Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only
roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at
the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts
the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery.
The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful fringes
of the Hatchard spruces, caught the straw hat of a young man just
passing under them, and spun it clean across the road into the
duck-pond.
As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed that
he was a stranger, that he wore city clothes, and that he was laughing
with all his teeth, as the young and careless laugh at such mishaps.
Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that sometimes came
over her when she saw people with holiday faces made her draw back
into the house and pretend to look for the key that she knew she had
already put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror with a gilt eagle
over it hung on the passage wall, and she looked critically at her
reflection, wished for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like
Annabel Balch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield to spend
a week with old Miss Hatchard, straightened the sunburnt hat over her
small swarthy face, and turned out again into the sunshine.
"How I hate everything!" she murmured.

The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and she had the
street to herself. North Dormer is at all times an empty place, and at
three o'clock on a June afternoon its few able-bodied men are off in the
fields or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid household
drudgery.
The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger, and looking about
her with the heightened attention produced by the presence of a
stranger in a familiar place. What, she wondered, did North Dormer
look like to people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived
there since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of
some importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new
Episcopal clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other
Sunday--when the roads were not ploughed up by hauling--to hold a
service in the North Dormer church, had proposed, in a fit of
missionary zeal, to take the young people down to Nettleton to hear an
illustrated lecture on the Holy Land; and the dozen girls and boys who
represented the future of North Dormer had been piled into a
farm-waggon, driven over the hills to Hepburn, put into a way-train and
carried to Nettleton.
In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first and
only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with
plate-glass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened to a
gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she would
have enjoyed looking at if his explanations had not prevented her from
understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer
was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that her
position as custodian of the village library had previously failed to
excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly
into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the
impression of Nettleton began to fade, and she found it easier to take
North