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    Afterward
    Afterward
    Afterward
    Ebook44 pages43 minutes

    Afterward

    By Edith Wharton

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    Afterward by Edith Wharton is an ironic ghost story about greed and retribution. The ghost comes for one of the main characters long after a business transgression where the character wronged another. Excerpt: "Oh, there is one, of course, but you'll never know it." The assertion laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library. The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question was the central, the pivotal "feature."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateDec 8, 2020
    ISBN4064066435844
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) published more than forty books during her lifetime, including the classic Gilded Age society novels Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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      Book preview

      Afterward - Edith Wharton

      Edith Wharton

      Afterward

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      [email protected]

      EAN 4064066435844

      Table of Contents

      Cover

      Titlepage

      Text

      I

      Table of Contents

      Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.

      The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a new perception of its significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library.

      The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question was the central, the pivotal feature. Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw out: Well, there’s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo’s cousins, and you can get it for a song.

      The reason she gave for its being obtainable on these terms—its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities—were exactly those pleading in its favour with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural felicities.

      I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable, Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted; the least hint of ‘convenience’ would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again. And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various doubts and demands, refusing to believe that the house their cousin recommended was really Tudor till they learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply.

      It’s too uncomfortable to be true! Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a relapse to distrust: And the ghost? You’ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!

      Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had been struck by a note of flatness in Alida’s answering hilarity.

      Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.

      Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?

      His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back tantalisingly: Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.

      Never know it? Boyne pulled her up. But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?

      I can’t say. But that’s the story.

      "That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows

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