Before the house rose two stately pine trees, and all about small firs and hemlocks. The garden path struggled up to the porch between wild flowers and weeds, and looming against its ancient bulk the shadows of out-houses and barns.
It stood among the hills, and just below around a curve in the road, lay the placid grey reservoir.
Sometimes parties would cross the fields, walking slowly toward the mountains. And sometimes children could be heard murmuring in the underbrush of things they scarcely knew.
Strange things had happened in this country town. Murder, theft, and little girls found weeping, and silent morose boys scowling along in the ragweed, with half-shut sunburned eyelids.
The place was wild, deserted and impossible in Winter. In Summer it was over-run with artists and town folk with wives and babies. Every Saturday there were fairs on the green, where second-hand articles were sold for a song, and flirting was formidable and passing. There were picnics, mountain climbings, speeches in the townhall, on the mark of the beast, on sin, and democracy, and once in a while a lecture on something that “everyone should know,” attended by mothers, their offspring left with servants who knew what everyone shouldn’t.
Then there were movies, bare legs, deacons, misses in cascades of curls and on Sunday one could listen to Mr. Widdie, the clergyman, who suffered from consumption, speak on love of one’s neighbour.
In this house and in this town had lived, for some fifteen years or so, Emma Gonsberg.
She was a little creature, lively, smiling, extremely good-natured. She had been married twice, divorced once, and was now a widow still in her thirties.
Of her two husbands she seldom said anything. Once she made the remark: “Only fancy, they never did catch on to me at all.”
She tried to be fashionable, did her hair in the Venetian style, wore gowns after the manner of Lady de Bath entering her carriage; and tried to cultivate only those who could tell her “where she stood.”