Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick — Read

‘I suppose I have hated her from the first moment I saw her,' Monica Wilmott heard herself saying, and she saw Hester as she had first seen her, sitting in the open window of the Chelsea drawing-room against the background of the river; extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily assured, with black eyebrows and a thin black cloak lined with red. She had thought of Hester almost constantly since Clive had married her, but this habit of thinking aloud had crept upon her only since she had come to live alone in Essex, and it frightened her a little when she caught herself at it; it was dangerous, as anything automatic in life might be dangerous; a thing like that, said aloud, became much more real; more real than it was; one might shut oneself up in the cell of a self-suggestion if one listened to it. So now, on this solitary afternoon, darkened by cold summer rain, she rose from the window-seat where she had been looking out at the village-green, and walked with a swift step down the oddly shaped room that turned an angle at the chimney-piece and fell to a lower level reached by three shallow steps. The casement windows in the upper portion opened under a thatch, and the ceiling there was low and crossed by ancient beams; the little house had been contrived from two old cottages, and the second, loftier room was modern.

Monica Wilmott descended to it and looked out on the altered view, as uneventful as the first had been. There was a touch of romance in the silhouettes of the hedgerow elms; but it was a tame romance and her own house made part of it, so comfortably, so consciously picturesque with its beams and plaster, its eddying thatch and climbing roses. Never would she have chosen to live in such a house, nor to live in Essex at all, were it not that Clive lived in London and that here, though parted from him, she was near him. Oddley Green was almost suburban and the railway station lay but a mile away; she could hear the whistle of the trains as they passed all day and night, and she was glad to hear them; they seemed a link with London and with Clive.