Summary
On a Saturday afternoon, Margaret Fleming gazes out at the autumn rains stripping leaves from the trees, as she has every fall for the past twenty years but with quite different feelings. Before she saw them as symbols of loss; now she sees them sweeping away all her illusions. On the hearth of the library study, her husband George’s room, lies the fallen letter that has caused this change. It has announced the death of her marriage. Gazing at herself in the mirror, she wonders how he, one year older, could begin a new love, for her an act of desecration. Hearing his step, she retrieves the letter, hiding it in the front of her dress.
They exchange trivial conversation. Looking at him, vital and healthy as always, she is surprised to discover signs of slackness about his mouth that she had not noticed before. She wonders why these appeared only after he loved another, and suspects she does not really know him even after twenty years. However, until now she had believed her marriage nearly perfect. He admires her colorful flower arrangements; she remembers that she has always been pale and muses on how her surface life can look unchanged while she has been struck to the roots of her being. Does Rose Morrison, George’s young lover, have the color she lacks?
Before he leaves for business, he asks if she will correct the galleys of a history of law he has been writing. She realizes he could not have done it without her; she has been necessary to his serious life. She agrees, as always. He also asks her to do some routine domestic tasks for him. She wonders whether Rose has done any of these things.
She paces, hearing the rain and falling leaves, and resolves never to give him up. The butler announces Dorothy Chambers, her oldest friend and principal support, yet Margaret is reluctant to see her, discovering that suffering leads to deception and fearing that Dorothy will detect the difference in her.
Dorothy asks Margaret’s help in a charity drive, then mentions that two of their separated acquaintances have reconciled. Margaret is shocked out of her numbness; she cannot understand how the woman agreed because he had claimed to love the other woman. Dorothy cynically dismisses the quality of man’s love and states that the woman enjoys the act of forgiveness because of her “spiritual vanity.” To her, Margaret, though lovely, knows nothing of life. When Margaret retorts that Dorothy knows little of love, the latter asks whether she means man’s love or woman’s—for women love ideally, men only sensually. When Margaret still cannot understand why a man would want to live with a woman he has said he does not love, Dorothy points out that marriage involves more than love; it also involves convenience. Margaret bursts out that the woman then ought to give up the man; Dorothy asks her whether she would in a similar situation.
Margaret hesitates, then declares that she would. In making that decision, she experiences a peace beyond pain, grief, and bitterness. Dorothy tells her that she is a fool; George would be a comfort and a source of security even if love were over. Then she leaves.
Margaret takes a moment to plan her actions, then carries out the routine duties George had requested. Then, disdaining to take the car provided by George, she sets out to ride the trolley to the suburban address given in the letter—a villa George has acquired in an unfashionable suburb. Out in the rain, she is overwhelmed with melancholy, feeling utterly...
(This entire section contains 1247 words.)
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deserted; in the streetcar, immersed in isolation, she finds Dorothy’s phrase “spiritual vanity” echoing in her ears. Details from the entire twenty-year marriage drift through her mind like dead leaves.
From the suburban station she walks to the villa through piles of sodden leaves that look like graves. The villa itself is nondescript, neglected. A maid answers the bell, informing Margaret that her mistress is out; when Margaret announces that she will wait, she is led to a recently occupied living room. Then Rose enters. Margaret is at first dazzled by her beauty, then sees it only as the flame of burning leaves.
Behind Rose’s youth and beauty Margaret senses the assurance of habitual self-gratification. Rose says that she is glad Margaret came, that it hurt her to write the letter but that she believes in always telling the truth. She says that George does not know she wrote; she wanted to spare him, as, of course, Margaret does. Margaret believes she has spent her life sparing him.
Rose offers Margaret a cup of tea or a cigarette, speculating on what Victorian women like Margaret did for solace without cigarettes. Margaret declines, now seeing in Rose all the crude rapacity of youth and also the insolence of an artist. Rose acknowledges this: She has a studio in Greenwich Village but paints in the summers at Ogonquit, where she met George. She knew George was married but also that Margaret did not understand him, as she does. Rejecting Margaret’s claim of shared experiences, she asserts that only an artist could understand him. When Margaret asks whether George claimed to be misunderstood, Rose becomes nearly indignant, stating that George would rather suffer silently than make her unhappy. As proof of George’s love, Rose offers to show his letters. Then she states that if she were in Margaret’s position, she would gladly give him up out of love.
Margaret recoils from this, finding Rose, like youth in general, eager to benefit from the sacrifices of others and realizing that all of her sacrifices have preserved George’s youth at her expense. However, she has been trained in sacrifice, and she feels convinced that George must love Rose; otherwise he would not have brought her this much grief. She resolves to concede; as she leaves, Rose assures her that she and George share a superior understanding.
Margaret returns, convinced that George truly loves Rose, that his dilemma must have been devastating, that she has failed to understand him, and that she must sacrifice herself for him. Her love compels her not to stand in his way.
When they meet, she tells him that she has seen Rose Morrison, expecting him to be overcome by remorse. Instead he is blank, merely asking what she knows of Rose. In the face of this apparent denial, she discloses bit by bit her discoveries of that afternoon, ending with the confession that she does not want to stand in his way. Finally he exclaims, “What does it have to do with you?” and denies that he has ever loved Rose. He admits that Rose loves him, after her fashion, but for him it has been only a tawdry affair and he has no intention of leaving Margaret. He rehearses the history of their liaison, begun the previous summer when Margaret was ill, calling it simply a “recreation.”
Margaret feels totally compromised, even sensing for a moment that she and Rose were bonded more closely in this experience of female disillusionment than she and George could ever be. She finds herself incapable of responding to George’s pleas, mutely caught up in a sense of loss of more than love, for she has ceased to believe in life. As he embraces her, her glance strays through the window to the falling leaves outside.
