th nowadays.
When Ethan could sweat over 'em both from sunup to dark he kinder choked
a living out of 'em; but his folks ate up most everything, even then,
and I don't see how he makes out now. Fust his father got a kick, out
haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts
afore he died. Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as
weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she's always been the greatest hand
at doctoring in the county. Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's
had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping."

The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between
the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin,
made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he
drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the
afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to
Starkfield. The distance each way was barely three miles, but the old
bay's pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were
nearly an hour on the way. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins
loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the
helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the
bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or
answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight
pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy
landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm
and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing
unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of
moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that
his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic
as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the
profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment;
and the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know more. Once I
happened to speak of an engineering job I had been on the previous year
in Florida, and of the contrast between the winter landscape about us
and that in which I had found myself the year before; and to my surprise
Frome said suddenly: "Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while
afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all
snowed under