Madame Antoine had not gone to mass. Her son Tonie had, but she supposed
he would soon be back, and she invited Robert to be seated and wait for
him. But he went and sat outside the door and smoked. Madame Antoine
busied herself in the large front room preparing dinner. She was boiling
mullets over a few red coals in the huge fireplace.
Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing
the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck and arms in
the basin that stood between the windows. She took off her shoes and
stockings and stretched herself in the very center of the high, white
bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed,
with its sweet country odor of laurel lingering about the sheets and
mattress! She stretched her strong limbs that ached a little. She ran
her fingers through her loosened hair for a while. She looked at her
round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the
other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first
time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh. She clasped her
hands easily above her head, and it was thus she fell asleep.
She slept lightly at first, half awake and drowsily attentive to the
things about her. She could hear Madame Antoine's heavy, scraping tread
as she walked back and forth on the sanded floor. Some chickens were
clucking outside the windows, scratching for bits of gravel in the
grass. Later she half heard the voices of Robert and Tonie talking under
the shed. She did not stir. Even her eyelids rested numb and heavily
over her sleepy eyes. The voices went on--Tonie's slow, Acadian drawl,
Robert's quick, soft, smooth French. She understood French imperfectly
unless directly addressed, and the voices were only part of the other
drowsy, muffled sounds lulling her senses.
When Edna awoke it was with the conviction that she had slept long and
soundly. The voices were hushed under the shed. Madame Antoine's step
was no longer to be heard in the adjoining room. Even the chickens had
gone elsewhere to scratch and cluck. The mosquito bar was drawn over
her; the old woman had come in while she slept and let down the bar.
Edna arose quietly from the bed, and looking between the curtains of the
window, she saw by the slanting rays of the sun that the afternoon was
far advanced. Robert was out there under the shed, reclining in the
shade against the sloping keel of the overturned boat. He was reading
from a book. Tonie was no longer with him. She wondered what had become
of the rest of the party. She peeped out at him two or three times as
she stood washing herself in the little basin between the windows.