Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/142

 again she would go out, 'frail and miserable as she was,' and commit adultery. I remember the story because I overheard my father telling it when I was a child and I was miserable until I found out what 'committing adultery' meant. In the end she destroyed him. I'm sure of it."

Sabine sat there, with a face like stone, following with her eyes the cloud of dust that moved along the lane as Aunt Cassie progressed on her morning round of visits, a symbol in a way of all the forces that had warped her own existence.

"It's possible," murmured Olivia.

Sabine turned toward her with a quick, sudden movement. "That's why she is always so concerned with the lives of other people. She has never had any life of her own, never. She's always been afraid. It's why she loves the calamities of other people, because she's never had any of her own. Not even her husband's death was a calamity. It left her free, completely free of troubles as she had always wanted to be."

And then a strange thing happened to Olivia. It was as if a new Aunt Cassie had been born, as if the old one, so full of tears and easy sympathy who always appeared miraculously when there was a calamity in the neighborhood, the Aunt Cassie who was famous for her good works and her tears and words of religious counsel, had gone down the lane for the last time, never to return again. To-morrow morning a new Aunt Cassie would arrive, one who outwardly would be the same; only to Olivia she would be different, a woman stripped of all those veils of pretense and emotions with which she wrapped herself, an old woman naked in her ugliness who, Olivia understood in a blinding flash of clarity, was like an insect battering itself against a pane of glass in a futile attempt to enter where it was impossible for her ever to enter. And she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie now. She did not even dislike her; she only pitied the old woman