The Way Back

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Stella Beacon and her husband, spoiled for years, are shocked into reality. Can they find their way back?

I

AND THEN?

Dear Dr. Schilling’s voice from the shadows behind her gave her courage to continue with the recital. Dear Dr. Schilling. Sometimes Stella Beacon thought she might have lost her reason if she had not found him.

She lay on the sofa in the small beige room. Light from a single lamp behind Dr. Schilling cast his silhouette like a gigantic gray moth against the wall.

And then?

What had she been saying? Oh, yes. She had been telling him about the time she came home from Bermuda and found the lipstick in Tom’s dinner jacket. That certainly proved...

Perhaps you’re exhausted, Mrs. Beacon.

Perhaps she was. It had been a bad day. Out since ten-thirty; a fitting at Lucy’s, where everything went wrong; luncheon with that boring career woman Natalie Fletcher (of course, she had Natalie to thank for dear Dr. Schilling); two hours pouring tea for the Greeks (people would go on and on with the most harrowing stories about famine).

Yes, she’d been ready for Dr. Schilling at four-thirty. How nice to lie in this peaceful room, opening wide your heart and your mind, remembering, floating lazily back up a river of time, exploring obscure tributaries of thought and experience that you had never dreamed were important. And yet everything that ever happened to you was important.

Yes, I am tired, she said. She swung her feet to the floor. Dr. Schilling was instantly at her side, helping her. Stella thanked him with her eyes. The little courtesies; the charm of the man. How unlike Tom. Mustn’t spoil me, she said. He pressed her hand slightly. I’m almost thirty-five years old. If I can’t take care of myself by now...

Of course you can. But should you?

She felt a sudden tingling at the base of her hairline. She was standing close to the man. He was so quiet and reserved, yet she knew what he must be thinking: How fragile and helpless she is, married to a man who...

Then it came out. No longer could she suppress the question she had been leading up to ever since that day when she first talked to him about Tom and herself.

Dr. Schilling. Should I leave him?

He did not move, nor was there any change in his expression. Yet something happened to his eyes.

My dear Mrs. Beacon, he said. Something was gone from his voice too. Warmth? For a moment he had been close, but now he had retreated within himself and closed a door. She had to get through to him again.

Clive! she cried. She had never called him that before. Clive! Listen to me. You know all there is to know about me. I’ve no one to turn to. Oh, I have friends, but they don’t belong to the real me, the me that you know. They don’t know how suffocated I am. You know! Tell me. Does he have any right to keep me chained?

Dr. Schilling took her hand in both of his. My dear Mrs. Beacon, he repeated.

"It’s too soon to talk of what you are going to do with your future. We still have a great