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By Root 651 0

future. Though he considers her seduced by a scoundrel, she will be held responsible for her actions for the rest of her life. And does she understand, he adds, spitting and spraying his question across the room with all the fury of a father whose worst nightmare has come to pass almost before he has had time to imagine it, that such an accounting not only includes the ruin of Catherine Haskell, an entirely blameless and thoroughly wronged woman, but also must encompass the lives of her innocent children as well? As for John Haskell himself, her father cannot speak, being unable even to utter the name and wanting, in these early days, to do the man, whom he has trusted as a friend, grievous bodily harm.

She sits in silence and listens to the specifics of her sentence: She will not be permitted to leave the house for the foreseeable future, and for at least a month, while he and her mother consider what to do with her and how to salvage the few remaining bits of her future, she will not be allowed to leave her room. Indeed, she is to be confined to that room with no companionship, with no access to letters or the outside world, and without any books to distract her. Her meals will be brought to her on a tray, and she will not be permitted even a walk in the park. The purpose of this deprivation, her father explains carefully, is to allow her suitable time to contemplate the gravity of her position. And then, to Olympia’s dismay, her father suddenly begins to sob, right there in the sitting room, which is far worse than his ferocious scolding. He sits down hard in a chair, as if he has collapsed. She leaves her own chair and crouches down before him and implores him to stop, for she cannot bear his sadness. He draws himself up then and insists that she get off her knees. He asks if she would be so kind in future weeks and months as to omit any theatrics from their discourse, which he gives her to understand will be limited to only those sentences absolutely necessary to utter to another human being with whom one shares living space. And thus with chilly dismissal, he bids her leave the room and begin her confinement.

A worse punishment her father could not, with all the forethought in the world, have devised for her. To sit in a chair, hour after hour, and contemplate her own demise is bad enough: She will not have a husband or a family; she will not be able to continue her education, either with her father or in any institution; she will be relegated to the worst of circumstances for a woman, that of spinsterhood and utter uselessness; for the rest of her years, the scandal, which might alternately titillate or alarm others, will follow her; she will be held up as an example to young women of the ravages of sin; and, in short, she will be the recipient of that most remorseless and despicable of sentiments, which is pity. But to know that one is responsible for the ruin of innocents is nearly unendurable. Occasionally, her father knocks on the door and enters her room and feeds her bits of information he considers instructive or likely to whet the knife edges of her punishment. Catherine Haskell and her children returned to York on the eleventh of August, her father briefly announces one day, permitting her no questions in reply. Later she is told that that man has been stripped of his position at the college and at the clinics in both Cambridge and Ely Falls. She is not informed as to his whereabouts or how he might now make his living. She is not told how Catherine and her children will survive, only that the new cottage, in which the doomed couple spent just the one dreadful night, has been put up for sale.

Olympia is left to her own thoughts and speculations, which renew themselves each morning upon awakening and only very slowly begin to seem familiar. But after a month has passed, she learns a curious fact about herself: Her capacity for remorse is finite. The spirit does not easily submit to annihilation, she finds, and thus it will devise a way, though the path may run through the most complicated of mazes with