Explore "Afterward" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the / next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery / of her sense of security.
It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it / accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her / from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the / urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in / some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the previous / day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper / article, -- as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return / upon the past, -- had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting / moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband's / affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him / instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith / had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and / suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and / unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the cross-examination / to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of / her lurking doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.