The Progress of Love

nightgown and rubber boots. “They’ll say we got a queer streak in this family now, for sure.”
    Violet told her parents to go to bed, and they went, as if they were the children. Though she hadn’t been to bed last night, and her eyes felt as they had been rubbed with sandpaper, she was sure she could never sleep herself. She got down all the letters that Dawn Rose had written from their place behind the clock, and folded them without looking at them and put them in an envelope. She wrote a note and put it in with them, and addressed the envelope to Trevor.
    We have found out who wrote these , her note said. It was my sister . She is fourteen years old. I don’t know if she is crazy, or what. I don’t know what I should do. I want you to come and get me and take me away . I hate it here. You can see what her mind is like. I can’t sleep here. Please if you love me come and get me and take me away .
    She took this envelope down to the mailbox in the dark, and put in the pennies for the stamp. She had actually forgotten the other letter and the pennies already there. It seemed as if that letter had gone off days before.
    She lay down on the hard parlor couch. In the dark, she couldn’t see the picture that she used to think so powerful, so magical. She tired to remember the feeling it had given her. She fell asleep very soon.
    Why did Violet do this? Why did she send those ugly letters to Trevor, and put such a note in with them? Did she really want to be rescued, told what to do? Did she want his help with the problem of Dawn Rose—his prayers, even? (Since this whole thing began, Violet hadn’t given a thought to praying, or involving God in any way.)
    She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgment had deserted her. That was all.
    The day after those letters were collected, Violet herself was standing by the mailbox in the morning. She wanted to get a ride into town with the mailman, so that she could catch the one-o’clock train to Ottawa.
    “You folks got some bad business going on?” the mailman said. “Some bad business with your daddy?”
    “That’s all right,” said Violet. “That’s all over.”
    She knew that mail posted here was delivered in Ottawa the next day. There were two deliveries, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. If Trevor was out all day—and he usually was—his letters would be left waiting for him on the hall table of the house where he boarded, the house of a minister’s widow. The front door was usually left unlocked. Violet could get to the letters before he did.
    Trevor was at home. He had a bad summer cold. He was sitting in his study with a white scarf wrapped like a bandage around his throat.
    “Don’t come near me, I’m full of germs,” he said as Violet crossed the room toward him. From his tone of voice, you would have thought she was.
    “You forgot to leave the door open,” he said. The door of the study had to be left open when Violet was in there, so that the minister’s widow would not be scandalized.
    Spread out on his desk, among his books and sermon notes, were all the smudged, creased, disgraceful letters that Dawn Rose had written.
    “Sit down,” said Trevor, in a tired, croaking voice. “Sit down, Violet.”
    So she had to sit in front of his desk, like some unhappy parishioner, some poor young woman who had got into trouble.
    He said that he was not surprised to see her. He had thought she might show up. Those were his words. “Show up.”
    “You were going to tear them up if you got here first,” he said.
    Yes. Exactly.
    “So I would never have known,” he said.
    “I would have told you someday.”
    “I doubt it,” said Trevor, in his miserable croaking voice. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, but I doubt it,” in an attempt to be kinder, more patient, more ministerial.
    They talked from midafternoon until dark. Trevor talked. He rubbed the outside of his throat to keep his voice going. He talked until his throat was quite raw, stopped for a rest, and talked again. He didn’t say a single thing that Violet couldn’t have predicted, from the moment when he first raised his eyes to her. From the moment when he said, “Don’t come near me.”
    And in the letter that she received from him, a few days later—in which he said the final things he couldn’t quite bring himself to say to her face—there was also not one word she didn’t know ahead of