In this passage, Zeena and Ethan are a married couple. Mattie is a young woman, a relative of Zeena’s, who lives with them. This passage takes palace just after Zeena has returned from a journey.
Zeena came back into the room, her lips twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face. The shawl had slipped from her shoulders and was dragging at her down-trodden heels, and in her hands she carried the fragments of 5 the red glass pickle-dish.
“I’d like to know who done this,” she said, looking sternly from Ethan to Mattie.
There was no answer, and she continued in a trembling voice: “It takes the stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt 10 Philura Maple’s pickle-dish up there o’ purpose when we was married, and it’s never been down since, ‘cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it with my own hands, so’s ‘t shouldn’t get broke.” She laid the fragments reverently on the table. “I want to know who done this,” she quavered.
15 At the challenge Ethan turned back into the room and faced her. “I can tell you, then. The cat done it.”
She looked at him hard, and then turned her eyes to Mattie, who was carrying the dish-pan to the table.
“I’d like to know how the cat got into my china-closet,” she
“Chasin’ mice, I guess,” Ethan rejoined. “There was a mouse round the kitchen all last evening.”
Zeena continued to look from one to the other; then she emitted her small strange laugh. “I knew the cat was a smart 25 cat,” she said in a high voice, “but I didn’t know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces of my pickle-dish and lay ‘em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked ‘em off of.”
Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. “It wasn’t Ethan’s fault, Zeena! The cat did break the dish; but I
30 got it down from the china-closet, and I’m the one to blame for its getting broken.”
Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony image of resentment, “You got down my pickle-dish—what for?”
35 A bright flush flew to Mattie’s cheeks. “I wanted to make the supper-table pretty,” she said.
“You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got, and wouldn’t never use it, not even when 40 the minister come to dinner, or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge—” Zeena paused with a gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. “You’re a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you
45 couldn’t get ‘em—and now you’ve took from me the one I cared for most of all—”
Adapted from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.