2. with a paralyzed inability to
accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild
abandonment, in her sister's arms.
When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her
room alone. She would have no
one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy
armchair. Into this she sank,
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body
and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of
trees that were all aquiver with
the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air.
In the street below a peddler was
crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one
was singing reached her faintly,
and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through
the clouds that had met and
piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the
chair, quite motionless, except
when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child
4. as her two white slender hands would have been.
When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her
slightly parted lips. She
said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The
vacant stare and the look of terror
that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and
bright. Her pulses beat fast, and
the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy
that held her. A clear and
exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as
trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind,
tender hands folded in death;
the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed
and gray and dead. But she saw
beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come
that would belong to her
absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in
welcome.
There would be no one to live for her during those coming
years; she would live for herself.
There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind
6. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” originally published
1894.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her.
Spring days, and summer days,
and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a
quick prayer that life might be long.
It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life
might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's
importunities. There was a feverish
triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a
goddess of Victory. She clasped
her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs.
Richards stood waiting for them at the
bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was
Brently Mallard who entered, a
little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and
umbrella. He had been far from the
scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been
one. He stood amazed at Josephine's
piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the
view of his wife.
7. But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart
disease—of joy that kills.