{"product_id":"2940013747494","title":"Here and Beyond","description":"It was not till the following spring that I plucked up courage to tell\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Bridgeworth what had happened to me that night at Morgat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the first place, Mrs. Bridgeworth was in America; and after the night\u003cbr\u003ein question I lingered on abroad for several months--not for pleasure,\u003cbr\u003eGod knows, but because of a nervous collapse supposed to be the result\u003cbr\u003eof having taken up my work again too soon after my touch of fever in\u003cbr\u003eEgypt. But, in any case, if I had been door to door with Grace\u003cbr\u003eBridgeworth I could not have spoken of the affair before, to her or to\u003cbr\u003eany one else; not till I had been rest-cured and built up again at one\u003cbr\u003eof those wonderful Swiss sanatoria where they clean the cobwebs out of\u003cbr\u003eyou. I could not even have written to her--not to save my life. The\u003cbr\u003ehappenings of that night had to be overlaid with layer upon layer of\u003cbr\u003etime and forgetfulness before I could tolerate any return to them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe beginning was idiotically simple; just the sudden reflex of a New\u003cbr\u003eEngland conscience acting on an enfeebled constitution. I had been\u003cbr\u003epainting in Brittany, in lovely but uncertain autumn weather, one day\u003cbr\u003eall blue and silver, the next shrieking gales or driving fog. There is a\u003cbr\u003erough little white-washed inn out on the Pointe du Raz, swarmed over by\u003cbr\u003etourists in summer but a sea-washed solitude in autumn; and there I was\u003cbr\u003estaying and trying to do waves, when some one said: \"You ought to go\u003cbr\u003eover to Cape something else, beyond Morgat.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI went, and had a silver-and-blue day there; and on the way back the\u003cbr\u003ename of Morgat set up an unexpected association of ideas: Morgat--Grace\u003cbr\u003eBridgeworth--Grace's sister, Mary Pask--\"You know my darling Mary has a\u003cbr\u003elittle place now near Morgat; if you ever go to Brittany do go to see\u003cbr\u003eher. She lives such a lonely life--it makes me so unhappy.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was the way it came about. I had known Mrs. Bridgeworth well for\u003cbr\u003eyears, but had only a hazy intermittent acquaintance with Mary Pask, her\u003cbr\u003eolder and unmarried sister. Grace and she were greatly attached to each\u003cbr\u003eother, I knew; it had been Grace's chief sorrow, when she married my old\u003cbr\u003efriend Horace Bridgeworth, and went to live in New York, that Mary, from\u003cbr\u003ewhom she had never before been separated, obstinately lingered on in\u003cbr\u003eEurope, where the two sisters had been travelling since their mother's\u003cbr\u003edeath. I never quite understood why Mary Pask refused to join Grace in\u003cbr\u003eAmerica. Grace said it was because she was \"too artistic\"--but, knowing\u003cbr\u003ethe elder Miss Pask, and the extremely elementary nature of her interest\u003cbr\u003ein art, I wondered whether it were not rather because she disliked\u003cbr\u003eHorace Bridgeworth. There was a third alternative--more conceivable if\u003cbr\u003eone knew Horace--and that was that she may have liked him too much. But\u003cbr\u003ethat again became untenable (at least I supposed it did) when one knew\u003cbr\u003eMiss Pask: Miss Pask with her round flushed face, her innocent bulging\u003cbr\u003eeyes, her old-maidish flat decorated with art-tidies, and her vague and\u003cbr\u003etimid philanthropy. Aspire to Horace--!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWell, it was all rather puzzling, or would have been if it had been\u003cbr\u003einteresting enough to be worth puzzling over. But it was not. Mary Pask\u003cbr\u003ewas like hundreds of other dowdy old maids, cheerful derelicts content\u003cbr\u003ewith their innumerable little substitutes for living. Even Grace would\u003cbr\u003enot have interested me particularly if she hadn't happened to marry one\u003cbr\u003eof my oldest friends, and to be kind to his friends. She was a handsome\u003cbr\u003ecapable and rather dull woman, absorbed in her husband and children, and\u003cbr\u003ewithout an ounce of imagination; and between her attachment to her\u003cbr\u003esister and Mary Pask's worship of her there lay the inevitable gulf\u003cbr\u003ebetween the feelings of the sentimentally unemployed and those whose\u003cbr\u003eaffections are satisfied. But a close intimacy had linked the two\u003cbr\u003esisters before Grace's marriage, and Grace was one of the sweet\u003cbr\u003econscientious women who go on using the language of devotion about\u003cbr\u003epeople whom they live happily without seeing; so that when she said:\u003cbr\u003e\"You know it's years since Mary and I have been together--not since\u003cbr\u003elittle Molly was born. If only she'd come to America! Just think...Molly\u003cbr\u003eis six, and has never seen her darling auntie...\" when she said this,\u003cbr\u003eand added: \"If you go to Brittany promise me you'll look up my Mary,\" I\u003cbr\u003ewas moved in that dim depth of one where unnecessary obligations are\u003cbr\u003econtracted.","brand":"WDS Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47083166040304,"sku":"2940013747494","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013747494_p0.jpg?v=1763589730","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013747494","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}