The Progress of Love

wrought iron. The walls were painted, not papered. They were a pale green. Violet bought a new sofa and chair upholstered in a rich moss-green fabric, and a coffee table with a glass tray that fitted over the wooden top. The curtains were called drapes, and had pull cords. As they closed over the windows, a pattern of shiny cream-colored leaves rippled out across the dull cream background. There was no ceiling light—just floor lamps. In the kitchen there were knotty-pine cupboards and a knotty-pine breakfast nook. Another flight of steps—these were open and steep—led down to a little hedged-in back yard, which only Violet had the use of. It was as tidily enclosed, as susceptible to arrangement and decoration, as any living room.
    During the first two years he went to high school in town, Dane visited Violet fairly often. He stayed overnight in the apartment when the weather was stormy. Violet made him up a bed on the moss-green sofa. He was a skinny, ravenous, redheaded boy in those days—nobody can credit the skinniness now—and Violet fed him well. She made him hot chocolate with whipped cream to drink at bedtime. She served him creamed chicken in tart shells, and layer cakes, and something called gravel pie, which was made with maple syrup. She ate one piece, and he ate the rest. This was a great change from the rough-and-ready meals at home with his father and the hired man. Violet told him stories about her own childhood on the farm, with his mother and the other sister, who lived out in Edmonton now, and their mother and father, whom she called “characters.”Everybody was a character in those stories; everything was shaped to be funny.
    She had bought a record player, and she played records for him, asking him to choose his favorite. His favorite was the record she got as a bonus when she joined a record club that would introduce her to classical music. It was The Birds , by Respighi. Her favorite was Kenneth McKellar Singing Sacred and Secular Songs .
    She didn’t come out to the farm anymore. Dane’s father, when he stopped to pick Dane up, never had time for a cup of coffee. Perhaps he was afraid to sit down in such an elegant apartment in his farm clothes. Perhaps he still held a little grudge against Violet for what she had done at church.
    Violet had made a choice there, right at the beginning of her town life. The church had two doors. One door was used by country people—the reason for this originally being that it was nearer to the drive shed—and the other by town people. Inside, the pattern was maintained: town people on one side of the church, country people on the other. There was no definable feeling of superiority or inferiority involved; that was just the way it was. Even country people who had retired and moved to town made a point of not using the town door, though that might mean going out of their way, walking right past it, to the country door.
    Violet’s move, and her job, certainly made her a town person. But when she first came to that church, Dane and his father were the only people in it that she knew. Choosing the country side would have shown loyalty, and a certain kind of pride, a forgoing of privilege. (For it was true that most of the elders and ushers and Sunday-school teachers were chosen from the town side, just as most of the fancy hats and fashionable ladies’ outfits appeared over there.) Choosing the town side, which was what Violet did, showed an acceptance of status, perhaps even a wish for more.
    Dane’s father teased her on the sidewalk afterward. “You like the company over there?”
    “It just seemed handier,” Violet said, pretending not to know what he was talking about. “I don’t know about the company. I think some fellow had a dead cigar in his pocket.”
    Dane wished so much that Violet hadn’t done that. It wasn’tthat he wanted anything serious to happen between Violet and his father—for instance, marriage. He couldn’t imagine that. He just wanted them to be on the same side, so that could be his side.
    On an afternoon in June, when he had finished writing one of his exams, Dane went around to Violet’s apartment to get a book he had left there. He was allowed to use the apartment to study in while she was at work. He would open the French doors and let in the smell of the countryside just freed of snow, with its full creeks and leaky swamps and yellowing willow trees and steaming furrows. Dust came in, too, but he always thought