Miss Mary Pask by Edith Wharton

It was not till the following spring that I plucked up courage to tell / Mrs. Bridgeworth what had happened to me that night at Morgat.

In the first place, Mrs. Bridgeworth was in America; and after the night / in question I lingered on abroad for several months-not for pleasure, / God knows, but because of a nervous collapse supposed to be the result / of having taken up my work again too soon after my touch of fever in / Egypt. But, in any case, if I had been door to door with Grace / Bridgeworth I could not have spoken of the affair before, to her or to / any one else; not till I had been rest-cured and built up again at one / of those wonderful Swiss sanatoria where they clean the cobwebs out of / you. I could not even have written to her-not to save my life. The / happenings of that night had to be overlaid with layer upon layer of / time and forgetfulness before I could tolerate any return to them.

The beginning was idiotically simple; just the sudden reflex of a New / England conscience acting on an enfeebled constitution. I had been / painting in Brittany, in lovely but uncertain autumn weather, one day / all blue and silver, the next shrieking gales or driving fog. There is a / rough little white-washed inn out on the Pointe du Raz, swarmed over by / tourists in summer but a sea-washed solitude in autumn; and there I was / staying and trying to do waves, when some one said: "You ought to go / over to Cape something else, beyond Morgat."

I went, and had a silver-and-blue day there; and on the way back the / name of Morgat set up an unexpected association of ideas: Morgat-Grace / Bridgeworth-Grace's sister, Mary Pask-"You know my darling Mary has a / little place now near Morgat; if you ever go to Brittany do go to see / her. She lives such a lonely life-it makes me so unhappy."

That was the way it came about. I had known Mrs. Bridgeworth well for / years, but had only a hazy intermittent acquaintance with Mary Pask, her / older and unmarried sister. Grace and she were greatly attached to each / other, I knew; it had been Grace's chief sorrow, when she married my old / friend Horace Bridgeworth, and went to live in New York, that Mary, from / whom she had never before been separated, obstinately lingered on in / Europe, where the two sisters had been travelling since their mother's / death. I never quite understood why Mary Pask refused to join Grace in / America. Grace said it was because she was "too artistic"-but, knowing / the elder Miss Pask, and the extremely elementary nature of her interest / in art, I wondered whether it were not rather because she disliked / Horace Bridgeworth. There was a third alternative-more conceivable if / one knew Horace-and that was that she may have liked him too much. But / that again became untenable (at least I supposed it did) when one knew / Miss Pask: Miss Pask with her round flushed face, her innocent bulging / eyes, her old-maidish flat decorated with art-tidies, and her vague and / timid philanthropy. Aspire to Horace-!

Well, it was all rather puzzling, or would have been if it had been / interesting enough to be worth puzzling over. But it was not. Mary Pask / was like hundreds of other dowdy old maids, cheerful derelicts content / with their innumerable little substitutes for living. Even Grace would / not have interested me particularly if she hadn't happened to marry one / of my oldest friends, and to be kind to his friends. She was a handsome / capable and rather dull woman, absorbed in her husband and children, and / without an ounce of imagination; and between her attachment to her / sister and Mary Pask's worship of her there lay the inevitable gulf / between the feelings of the sentimentally unemployed and those whose / affections are satisfied. But a close intimacy had linked the two / sisters before Grace's marriage, and Grace was one of the sweet / conscientious women who go on using the language of devotion about / people whom they live happily without seeing; so that when she said: / "You know it's years since Mary and I have been together-not since / little Molly was born. If only she'd come to America! Just think. / Molly is six, and has never seen her darling auntie. " when she said / this, and added: "If you go to Brittany promise me you'll look up my / Mary," I was moved in that dim depth of one where unnecessary / obligations are contracted.

And so it came about that, on that silver-and-blue afternoon, the idea / "Morgat-Mary Pask-to please Grace" suddenly unlocked the sense of duty / in me. Very well: I would chuck a few things into my bag, do my day's / painting, go to see Miss Pask when the light faded, and spend the night / at the inn at Morgat. To this end I ordered a rickety one-horse vehicle / to await me at the inn when I got back from my painting, and in it I / started out toward sunset to hunt for Mary Pask.

As suddenly as a pair of hands clapped over one's eyes, the sea-fog shut / down on us. A minute before we had been driving over a wide bare upland, / our backs turned to a sunset that crimsoned the road ahead; now the / densest night enveloped us. No one had been able to tell me exactly / where Miss Pask lived; but I thought it likely that I should find out at / the fishers' hamlet toward which we were trying to make our way. And I / was right. an old man in a doorway said: Yes-over the next rise, and / then down a lane to the left that led to the sea; the American lady who / always used to dress in white. Oh, _he_ knew. near the _Baie des / Trépassés_.

"Yes; but how can we see to find it? I don't know the place," grumbled / the reluctant boy who was driving me.

"You will when we get there," I remarked.

"Yes-and the horse foundered meantime! I can't risk it, sir; I'll get / into trouble with the _patron_."