# Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 22

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XXII
WHAT a time of year it was—the freed earth suddenly breaking into life from every frozen seam! Manford wondered if he had ever before had time to feel the impetuous loveliness of the American spring.
In spite of his drive home in the small hours he had started out early the next morning for a long tramp. Sleep—how could a man sleep with that April moonlight in his veins? The moon that was everywhere—caught in pearly puffs on the shadbush branches, scattered in ivory drifts of wild plum bloom, tipping the grasses of the wayside with pale pencillings, sheeting the recesses of the woodland with pools of icy silver. A freezing burning magic, into which a man plunged, and came out cold and aglow, to find everything about him as unreal and incredible as himself. . .
After the blatant club restaurant, noise, jazz, revolving couples, Japanese lanterns, screaming laughter, tumultuous good-byes, this white silence, the long road unwinding and twisting itself up again, blind faces of shuttered farmhouses, black forests, ​misty lakes—a cut through a world in sleep, all dumb and moon-bemused. . .
The contrast was beautiful, intolerable. . .
Sleep? He hadn't even gone to bed. Just plunged into a bath, and stretched out on his lounge to see the dawn come. A mysterious sight that, too; the cold fingers of the light remaking a new world, while men slept, unheeding, and imagined they would wake to some familiar yesterday. Fools!
He breakfasted—ravenously—before his wife was down, and swung off with a couple of dogs on a long tramp, he didn't care where.
Even the daylight world seemed unimaginably strange: as if he had never really looked at it before. He walked on slowly for three or four miles, vaguely directing himself toward Greystock. His long tramps as a boy, in his farming days, had given him the habit of deliberate steady walking, and the unwonted movement refreshed rather than tired him—or at least, while it tired his muscles, it seemed to invigorate his brain. Excited? No—just pleasantly stimulated. . .
He stretched himself out under a walnut tree on a sunny slope, lit his pipe and gazed abroad over fields and woods. All the land was hazy with incipient life. The dogs hunted and burrowed, and then came back to doze at his feet with pleasant dreamings. The sun on his face felt warm and human, and gradually life began to settle back into ​its old ruts—a comfortable routine, diversified by pleasant episodes. Could it ever be more, to a man past fifty?
But after a while a chill sank on his spirit. He began to feel cold and hungry, and set out to walk again.
Presently he found it was half-past eleven—time to be heading for home. Home; and the lunch-table; Pauline; and Nona; and Lita. Oh, God, no—not yet. . . He trudged on, slowly and sullenly, deciding to pick up a mouthful of lunch somewhere by the way.
At a turn of the road he caught sight of a woman's figure strolling across a green slope above him. Strong and erect in her trim golfing skirt, she came down in his direction swinging a club in her hand. Why, sure enough, he was actually on the edge of the Greystock course! The woman was alone, without companions or caddies—going around for a trial spin, or perhaps simply taking a stroll, as he was, drinking in the intoxicating air. . .
"Hullo!" she called, and he found himself advancing toward Gladys Toy.
Was this active erect woman in her nut-brown sweater and plaited skirt the same as the bejewelled and redundant beauty of so many wearisome dinners? Something of his old interest—the short-lived fancy of a week or two—revived in him as she swung along, treading firmly but lightly on her broad easy shoes.
​"Hullo!" he responded. "Didn't know you were here."
"I wasn't. I only came last night. Isn't it glorious?" Even her slow-dripping voice moved faster and had a livelier ring. Decidedly, he admired a well-made woman, a woman with curves and volume—all the more after the stripped skeletons he had dined among the night before. Mrs. Toy had height enough to carry off her pounds, and didn't look ashamed of them, either.
"Glorious? Yes, you are!" he said.
"Oh, me?"
"What else did you mean, then?"
"Don't be silly! How did you get here?"
"On my feet."
"Gracious! From Cedarledge? You must be dead."
"Don't you believe it. I walked over to lunch with you."
"You've just said you didn't know I was here."
"You mustn't believe everything I say."
"All right. Then I won't believe you walked over to lunch with me."
"Will you believe me when I tell you you're awfully beautiful?"
"Yes!" she challenged him.
"And that I want to kiss you?"
She smiled with the eyes of a tired swimmer, and he saw that her slender of repartee was exhausted. "Herman'll be here tonight," she said.
​"Then let's make the most of today."
"But I've asked some people to lunch at the club."
"Then you'll chuck them, and come off and lunch with me somewhere else."
"Oh, will I—shall I?" She laughed, and he saw her breast rise on her shortened breath. He caught her to him and planted a kiss in the middle of her laughter.
"Now will you?"
She was a rich armful, and he remembered how splendid he had thought plump rosy women in his youth, before money and fashion imposed their artificial standards.
When he reentered the doors of Cedarledge the cold spring sunset was slanting in through the library windows on the tea-table at which his wife and Nona sat. Of Lita there was no sign; Manford heard with indolent amusement that she was reported to be just getting up. His sentiment about Lita had settled into fatherly indulgence; he no longer thought the epithet inappropriate. But underneath the superficial kindliness he felt for her, as for all the world, he was aware of a fundamental indifference to most things but his own comfort and convenience. Such was the salutary result of fresh air and recovered leisure. How absurd to work one's self into a state of fluster about this or that—money or business or women! Especially women. As he looked back on the last weeks he saw what a fever ​of fatigue he must have been in to take such an exaggerated view of his own emotions. After three days at Cedarledge serenity had descended on him like a benediction. Gladys Toy's cheeks were as smooth as nectarines; and the keen morning light had shown him that she wasn't in the least made up. He recalled the fact with a certain pleasure, and then dismissed her from his mind—or rather she dropped out of herself. He wasn't in the humour to think long about anybody or anything . . . he revelled in his own laziness and indifference.
"Tea? Yes; and a buttered muffin by all means. Several of them. I'm as hungry as the devil. Went for a long tramp this morning before any of you were up. Mrs. Toy ran across me, and brought me back in her new two-seater. A regular beauty—the car, I mean—you'll have to have one like it, Nona. . . Jove, how good the fire feels . . . and what is it that smells so sweet? Carnations—why, they're giants! We must go over the green-houses tomorrow, Pauline; and all the rest of it. I want to take stock of all your innovations."
At that moment he felt able to face even the tour of inspection, and all the facts and calculations it would evoke. Everything seemed easy now that he had found he could shake off his moonlight obsession by spending a few hours with a pretty woman who didn't mind being kissed. He was to meet Mrs. Toy again the day after tomorrow; and in the interval ​she would suffice to occupy his mind when he had nothing more interesting to think of.
As he was putting a match to his pipe Lita came into the room with her long glide. Her boy was perched on her shoulder, and she looked like one of Crivelli's enigmatic Madonnas carrying a little red- haired Jesus.
"Gracious! Is this breakfast or tea? I seem to have overslept myself after our joy-ride," she said, addressing a lazy smile to Manford.
She dropped to her knees before the fire and held up the boy to Pauline. "Kiss his granny," she commanded in her faintly derisive voice.
It was very pretty, very cleverly staged; but Manford said to himself that she was too self-conscious, and that her lips were too much painted. Besides, he had always hated women with prominent cheek-bones and hollows under them. He settled back comfortably into the afternoon's reminiscences.