Love and Friendship [antikvár]

Chapter 1 The day on which Emily Stockwell Turner fell out of love with her husband began much like other days. As usual, Emmy lay in bed twenty minutes later than she should have done, with her son Freddy playing cars over her legs, and when she finally got up it seemed as if things would never be sorted out. But somehow breakfast was made; Freddy was fed and dressed and sent off to nursery school in the car pool, and at length Emmy stood outside the house watching her husband leave for work on time. 'Looks like snow,' said Turner, an instructor in the Languages and Literature Division at Convers College, as he stood beside her on the frozen lawn in his overcoat. It was a chilly, dark morning early in November, and Emmy wore only an old cashmere sweater and slacks, but she was the kind that never feels the cold. 'Oh, good; do you think so? But it's only the first week in November. I'm afraid it's much too soon.' 'It probably snows early here,' Holman said, and climbed into his car and shut the door. Through the glass he could see Emmy look round at the clouds, smiling. What a magnificent creature she is, he thought, as he frequently did. She was a big girl, tall, tanned like a gypsy, and with a high colour. Her heavy, bright-brown hair had not yet been done up for the day; it hung down over one shoulder in a thick braid. She was twenty-seven, and still had, as on the day he married her, the look of a carefully bred and beautifully groomed animal kept permanently at the peak of its condition for some high use which has not yet arrived and possibly never will arrive. Holman had seen it often on boys and girls of Emmy's class, though seldom to such a degree or accompanied by so much beauty. Emmy continued to stand beside the car, waiting for her husband to roll the window down, so he rolled it down. 'Goodbye, darling,' she said, stooping to kiss him. 'So long, baby,' Holman replied. He rolled the window up again and drove away down the drive. Emmy stood on the lawn, smiling, and watching his car, a little grey Volkswagen, turn into the road and grow smaller as it went 3