Chapter 15 — Robert leaves for Mexico

Edna comes in late to dinner, glowing from the day, and finds the pension's conversation already running on it: Robert is leaving for Mexico. Tonight. The boat for the city goes at four; he leaves Grand Isle at six. He has been planning to go for years — the perpetual Mexico — and the chance has at last come; Montel, the family friend, is waiting for him at Vera Cruz. He tells the story to the table half-cheerfully, half in self-defense. Edna sits down. Madame Lebrun is hurt that Robert told her only at the last minute. Adèle teases him. Edna says almost nothing.

She had spent the entire morning in his company at Madame Antoine's. There had been no hint. After dinner she goes to her room. She tries to read. She cannot. She comes out onto the gallery; Madame Lebrun is there. Robert appears, dressed for travel. The goodbye, in front of others, is brief. He shakes her hand. He asks her to write. He looks at her with something he cannot say in front of his mother. He turns and goes. Within minutes the carriage is on its way to the wharf.

Edna lies awake. She has been undeceived and reduced — she has been forced to put a name on what she is feeling. She has been infatuated; she has been shut out of an arrangement she did not know she was in. She thinks of every detail of the morning at Madame Antoine's. She does not yet know what to do with what she now knows. The summer's awakening, which the swim and the sleep and the long candor with Adèle had been opening, has had its first hard answer. She is a woman who has fallen in love with a man who, by the rules of the world she lives in, cannot stay.