Expiation

By Edith Wharton

"Expiation" is a short story written by Pulitzer prize winning author Edith Wharton. It was published in 1904 as one of the stories in the collection, "The Descent of Man and Other Stories". The Bishop of Ossining is announced at the home of Mrs. Fetherel, his niece. And when he is ushered in he has a polite request to make of her. A request she is all too willing to accede for the wellbeing of her soul…

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Aug 10, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547165750

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

Book preview

Edith Wharton

Expiation

EAN 8596547165750

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

I.

II

III

IV

V

I.

Table of Contents

I CAN never, said Mrs. Fetherel, hear the bell ring without a shudder.

Her unruffled aspect--she was the kind of woman whose emotions never communicate themselves to her clothes--and the conventional background of the New York drawing-room, with its pervading implication of an imminent tea-tray and of an atmosphere in which the social functions have become purely reflex, lent to her declaration a relief not lost on her cousin Mrs. Clinch, who, from the other side of the fireplace, agreed with a glance at the clock, that it _was_ the hour for bores.

Bores! cried Mrs. Fetherel impatiently. If I shuddered at _them_, I should have a chronic ague!

She leaned forward and laid a sparkling finger on her cousin's shabby black knee. I mean the newspaper clippings, she whispered.

Mrs. Clinch returned a glance of intelligence. They've begun already?

Not yet; but they're sure to now, at any minute, my publisher tells me.

Mrs. Fetherel's look of apprehension sat oddly on her small features, which had an air of neat symmetry somehow suggestive of being set in order every morning by the housemaid. Some one (there were rumors that it was her cousin) had once said that Paula Fetherel would have been very pretty if she hadn't looked so like a moral axiom in a copy-book hand.

Mrs. Clinch received her confidence with a smile. Well, she said, I suppose you were prepared for the consequences of authorship?

Mrs. Fetherel blushed brightly. It isn't their coming, she owned--it's their coming _now_.

Now?

The Bishop's in town.

Mrs. Clinch leaned back and shaped her lips to a whistle which deflected in a laugh. Well! she said.

You see! Mrs. Fetherel triumphed.

Well--weren't you prepared for the Bishop?

Not now--at least, I hadn't thought of his seeing the clippings.

And why should he see them?

Bella--_won't_ you understand? It's John.

John?

Who has taken the most unexpected tone--one might almost say out of perversity.

Oh, perversity-- Mrs. Clinch murmured, observing her cousin between lids wrinkled by amusement. What tone has John taken?

Mrs. Fetherel threw out her answer with the desperate gesture of a woman who lays bare the