The Awakening Read online

  Dr. Montgomery stopped his car, jumped out, hit her husband in the face and escorted Mrs. Soames to his car. Mrs. Soames was suspicious of the handsome young man at first, but then she asked herself, What could he possibly want from her?

  He drove her home to his family, who lived in a long, sprawling house that his family had owned since before the American Revolution. Dr. Montgomery’s mother, a breathtakingly beautiful woman, had swept down the stairs and looked Mrs. Soames up and down. “Another stray, Hank?” she’d said, then gone on her way.

  Mrs. Soames stayed with the lovely family for three months, making herself as useful as possible until Mrs. Montgomery began to say she couldn’t run the house without Mrs. Soames.

  Dr. Hank obtained a divorce for Mrs. Soames and then, to make sure she wasn’t bothered again, he asked her to go with him when he went all the way across the country to California to accept a post as an economics professor. Mrs. Soames had readily accepted and these last five years had been the happiest of her life.

  But the very trait in him that had made him save her was what also worried her. He cared about people less fortunate than he was. He cared about the man who delivered the coal and always had Mrs. Soames save a piece of pie for him. Yet there were several men Dr. Hank worked with, illustrious men, educated men, who he wasn’t particularly polite to.

  Last year that book of his that had caused such a stir had been published. All she knew was that it was something about being on the side of the maids and delivery men of the world. Mrs. Soames was sure it was a good book but it certainly had caused trouble.

  Union organizers, men who all seemed to be nervous, their eyes jumping around, came to see him. Mrs. Soames counted the silver when they left.

  She put the pie in the oven then grabbed the potatoes to mash. And now these rich farmers wanted her Dr. Hank to come and stay with them. Corrupt him, that’s what they wanted to do. Give him wine with his every meal, feed him French sauces and give him indigestion.

  And worst of all, she thought, as she slammed the masher against the innocent potatoes, they wanted to endanger her dear Dr. Hank’s life with that union riffraff. Her dear, saintly Dr. Hank needn’t risk his life for a bunch of people he didn’t know. He had enough to do at his college.

  She put the massacred potatoes aside and went into the parlor. He was sitting quietly on the sofa, reading his paper and sipping his whiskey. The setting sun came in through the west window and made his hair glow like an angel’s. Like the angel he was, she thought, looking at his profile. Such a handsome man, she thought. Such a good, kind, lovely man.

  She walked across the room to pull the curtains closed so the sun wouldn’t shine in his eyes and she saw a long white open-topped limousine pull up outside. A chauffeur in a spotless white uniform and cap sat in front and in back was a beautiful young woman wearing a white silk dress, an enormous-brimmed white hat with white ostrich plumes curling around it and softly framing the woman’s face. Her hair was a deep shade of red, the only color on her, the car or the chauffeur.

  Mrs. Soames jerked the curtains shut and gave a glare at the back of Hank’s head. There was one area where her Dr. Hank wasn’t so innocent and that was when it came to women. She never asked, of course, exactly what he did on those automobile races of his, but twice he had returned with articles of ladies’ undergarments in his luggage. Once there had been a black silk stocking inside his trouser leg.

  She turned to peep back out the curtain and saw the chauffeur helping the young woman out of the car. And in the woman’s hand was—oh no!—it looked to be a book of wallpaper samples.

  Mrs. Soames closed the curtain and rolled her eyes skyward. He had done it again. She had tried to explain that it was all right to save fat old women like herself from unpleasant situations, but when he started saving young women they expected something from him—like marriage and a family, for instance.

  She gave the back of his head a look of disgust. He was much too old to be getting himself into these predicaments.

  She walked to the front of him and took the newspaper out of his hands and began folding it. “You have a guest coming,” she said sternly. “Tall, red hair, henna I would say, very pretty.”

  Hank finished his whiskey and looked puzzled. “I don’t seem to remember…”

  When men had flaws they had flaws. Were there so many women in his life that he didn’t remember this stunning woman? She narrowed her eyes at him and slipped his empty glass into her apron pocket. “She has a bosom like the prow of a ship.”

  Hank grinned in memory. “Blythe Woodley.”

  Mrs. Soames’s mouth made a disapproving little line. “She has a wallpaper sample book.”

  Hank’s face lost its color. “She’s in front? I think I’ll go out the back. Tell her—”

  “I will not!” Mrs. Soames said indignantly. “You have made that poor woman believe something that isn’t true and now you must face her like a man and not take the cowardly way out.” She started to say more but she didn’t as she turned on her heel and left him alone in the room.

  Hank slowly slipped on his jacket and prepared to face what he knew was coming. Three years ago Blythe had been a student of his and he’d been impressed with her intelligence, her curiosity, the thought she put into her essays, her questions asked in class, and, not least of all, her magnificent bosom. Not that he ever was forward with her in the least. Even when she stayed after class and asked him questions and gave him every opportunity to make their relationship a more personal one, he had remained aloof from her. He didn’t touch his students.

  At the start of the next school year, he had expected to see her again but he hadn’t seen her on campus. Then one day he saw her walking across campus wearing some frothy sort of dress more suited for a dance than for study. He’d stopped her and asked her how she was. He didn’t like what she told him. Her family, which had a little money—nothing like Hank’s, though—had introduced her to the son of an old friend of her father’s. They’d spent all summer together and one thing led to another and at the end of the summer they’d become engaged. It was only after the engagement that Blythe found out that her fiancé didn’t want her to go to college. Under pressure from him, her family and his family, she’d left college and entered a cookery school.

  Hank hadn’t liked this idea; he hated the idea of someone else controlling another person’s life, but if it made Blythe happy, it wasn’t any of his concern.

  She said she was on her way to luncheon with her fiancé and, on impulse, she asked him to go with her.

  Also on impulse, Hank accepted her invitation. Maybe it was impulse but it might have been a tone in Blythe’s voice, a kind of urgency and pleading, or maybe it was the touch of sadness in her eyes.

  He went to lunch with them and it was worse than he feared. Blythe’s fiancé was obviously scared to death of a woman who might be as smart—or smarter—than he was. He condescendingly explained the items on the French menu to Blythe, yet Hank knew Blythe spoke and wrote French fluently. He asked Hank about his book, then, before Hank could answer, he patted Blythe’s hand and said they’d better not bore her with an intellectual conversation. And Blythe was the woman who’d last year missed only one question on the toughest final exam he’d ever given!

  He didn’t like what he saw but he wasn’t going to interfere. He’d already learned that when you stepped between a pretty woman and her fiancé or husband or father, pretty women expected you to marry them. Ugly women thanked you ever so much for freeing them and went on their way, but pretty women expected you to spend the rest of your life with them.

  So he’d walked away from that luncheon and done nothing, not so much as said one word to Blythe about how she was throwing her life away for this pompous young man.

  But then, the best-laid plans…

  He’d come in the winner of the Harriman Derby and he was exhilarated with winning and he didn’t remotely feel like a professor of economics. He was just a happy, health