d if his mother had died in spring
instead of winter...

When they married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out
the difficulties resulting from Mrs. Frome's long illness, they would
sell the farm and saw-mill and try their luck in a large town. Ethan's
love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had
always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there
were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things." A slight
engineering job in Florida, put in his way during his period of study at
Worcester, increased his faith in his ability as well as his eagerness
to see the world; and he felt sure that, with a "smart" wife like Zeena,
it would not be long before he had made himself a place in it.

Zeena's native village was slightly larger and nearer to the railway
than Starkfield, and she had let her husband see from the first that
life on an isolated farm was not what she had expected when she married.
But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan
learned the impossibility of transplanting her. She chose to look down
on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked
down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been
sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted
Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within
a year of their marriage she developed the "sickliness" which had since
made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.
When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like
the very genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had
been acquired by the absorbed observation of her own symptoms.

Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life
on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan
"never listened." The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke
it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to
remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed
the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things
while she talked. Of late, however, since he had reasons for observing
her more closely, her silence had begun to trouble him. He recalled his
mother's growing taciturnity, and wondered if Zeena were also turning
"queer." Women did, he knew. Zeena, who had at her fingers' ends the
pathological chart