A New England Nun

It is late afternoon in New England, and a gentle calm has settled in. A cowbell chimes in the distance, day laborers head home with shovels over their shoulders, and flies “dance” around people’s faces in the “soft air.” Louisa Ellis sits peacefully alone in her home. She had been calmly sewing by the window, and now she gently tucks her needle into her work and folds it “precisely” before putting it away in a basket. This is clearly part of a routine she’s done many times before.

Louisa puts on a green apron and a hat with a green ribbon. She goes outside to her garden, picks currants for her tea, and sits on her back steps to take off the stems. She then carefully gathers the stems into her apron and tosses them into the hen coop, making sure no stems have fallen out of place onto the grass outside of the coop. She takes her time doing each of these things.

Once inside, Louisa—still calmly and slowly—steeps her tea. When it is ready, she prepares herself to drink it with “as much grace as if she had been a veritable guest to her own self.” Each item in the kitchen seems to be exactly where it should be: a small square table in the precise middle of the kitchen, the clean and starched linen tablecloth set on top of the table, a napkin placed next to a china tea set that sits on a tea-tray atop the table. Louisa notes that her neighbors whisper about the fact that she uses china, rather than more practical crockery, but she does not seem to care.

Louisa then eats some sugared currants, a plate of little cakes, one white biscuit, and a few pieces of lettuce for dinner. She thinks how much she enjoys eating the lettuce, which she grows “to perfection” in her garden. She eats “heartily” but “delicately.” When she finishes her meal, she brings a plate of corn cakes, which she’s baked herself, out to the back yard and calls to her dog, Caesar. A large white and yellow dog, chained inside a small hut in the back yard, appears at the door to eat the corn cakes. Louisa pats him on the head and goes back inside.

Once back in the kitchen, Louisa carefully polishes the china tea set. Night has set in now, and she hears a “chorus” of frogs (and the odd toad) through the window—sounds that she very much enjoys. Louisa takes off her apron, revealing a smaller one underneath. She lights her lamp and sits down to pick her sewing back up.

A half hour later, Joe Dagget comes to the house. Louisa hears him approaching because of his “heavy step” on the way up to the house. She takes off her apron to reveal another one underneath—the apron she only wears for company. She begins to perform the same ritual of folding her needlework into the drawer as before. She finishes doing so just before Joe Dagget opens the door.

When Joe comes into the home, Louisa feels like he “fills up the whole room.” There is a small yellow canary in a green cage next to the window, which had been asleep, and it wakes up and begins to frantically beat its wings against the wires of the cage. The bird has this same reaction every time Joe Dagget comes over.

Louisa and Joe greet each other with strained cordiality. She brings him a chair, and they sit across from each other, both of them upright and a little uneasy. They begin to talk about the weather. Their conversation seems stilted and a bit forced. Louisa asks about work and about Joe’s mother. When Louisa asks after Joe’s mother’s caretaker, Lily Dyer, Joe appears to blush. They each exchange positive words about Lily Dyer, about her work ethic and her looks.

Joe begins to fiddle with some books on a table—an autograph album and a Young Lady’s Gift Book. He picks them up, opens them, and sets the books back down opposite to how he’d found them. Louisa fidgets in her seat until she has to get up and rearrange the books so that the Gift Book is on top, as it was before Joe had touched them. Joe laughs uneasily, asking what difference it makes which book is where, to which Louisa replies that she always keeps them this way. Joe shakes his head, amused but also a little bewildered—he finds this behavior very peculiar.

An hour later, Joe is ready to leave, but on his way out he trips over a rug. Trying to regain his balance, he knocks over the basket where Louisa keeps her sewing. He makes an effort to try to pick everything all up, but Louisa stops him, insisting that she’ll clean up once he’s gone. Joe is uncomfortable, and Louisa is uneasy—Joe’s discomfort and clumsiness are making her nervous. When Joe finally walks out the door, he sighs as soon as he’s alone in the “sweet evening air.” Louisa, too, feels incredibly relieved to again be alone. Joe feels like he was a “bear in a china shop,” and Louisa feels as though she were the owner of a china shop that had just had a bear in it.

Louisa puts all of her aprons back on and collects her things—the “scattered treasures”—that have fallen to the ground. She places her sewing materials back into their basket, straightens the rug, and begins examining the dirt on the carpet that Joe tracked in. She gets a dustpan to sweep it up.

Although Joe comes to visit Louisa twice a week, he is still not comfortable in her home, since he feels clumsy and uneasy when he visits, as though he is “surrounded by a hedge of lace.” However, he and Louisa are engaged and will be married in one month, so he feels absolute and fervent loyalty to her. Their engagement was unusual: it began fifteen years ago, and Joe has been away in Australia, seeking his fortune, for fourteen of those fifteen years. Joe has now returned to marry the woman who has been “unquestioningly waiting” for him.

Back then, Louisa, for her part, had encouraged Joe to travel. She and Joe had kissed good-bye, with Joe promising that it wouldn’t be long—then fourteen years passed until he returned. In that time, Louisa’s mother and brother had died, leaving her alone. But greater, internal changes had also taken place—Louisa had developed the ability to live alone, and she’d gotten so accustomed to her way of doing things that there was no longer “room for anyone at her side.” In fact, her first reaction when she heard that he was coming home was not excitement, but dismay. She had never cheated on him nor ever thought unkindly of him—and she had believed that she’d loved him when she accepted his engagement—she had just begun to imagine his return as something that would happen in another life.

Joe, too, had begun to feel apprehension just after he returned. Though he still found himself attracted to Louisa, the “winds of romance” eventually began “singing” another name. For Louisa, these winds had hardly ever really been there.

Louisa knows that if she marries Joe, she will have to leave her home and go to live at Joe’s homestead with his mother. She feels as though the “maidenly possessions” in her house are her friends, and she is distraught at the idea of leaving them. She also fears that she will no longer be able to use her still—where she distills fragrances, which she takes great pleasure in doing—because Joe and his mother would see distilling as a “pretty but senseless” hobby, meant for those who do not have husbands and houses to look after. In addition, she worries that she won’t be able to keep the new house clean and orderly, something she takes satisfaction in doing in her own home.

Louisa is also particularly concerned about the issue of Caesar, her dog. Caesar is now a sleepy and older dog but, in his youth, he bit the hand of a neighbor, who still carries the scars. That neighbor demanded the dog either be killed or “completely ostracized.” Louisa’s brother, alive at the time, had built the dog a small hut in the backyard and tied him up. Since then (for fourteen years), Louisa has kept the dog in this state—tending to him fondly but never releasing him. The dog has a terrifying reputation around town, as everyone remembers the bite. Louisa only feeds him corn-mush so as to never set off his “dangerous temper” with the taste of meat. Louisa is convinced that Joe will let Caesar loose and that the dog might “rampage” through the village.

Yet, despite all of Louisa’s concerns about the marriage, she feels like she cannot betray Joe by going back on her promise to marry him. So, she continues to sew “exquisite little stiches” into her wedding dress.

One night, just a week before their wedding, there is a full moon, and Louisa goes for an evening walk. She takes in the cherry trees, apple trees, and blueberry shrubs. She admires the moon, “twinkling like silver,” and the shadow it casts on her path. She feels a sweet, mysterious feeling in the air and wonders to herself what a particular fruit off to the side might be.

Just before she is about to leave, Louisa hears voices. She thinks she’ll stay hidden and let the people pass, but they take seats along the path, so she isn’t able to go on without being seen. Then, she recognizes one of the voices: it is Joe Dagget’s. Louisa realizes that Joe is with Lily Dyer. Lily is lit by the moonlight, and Louisa notices how lovely Lily looks, full of “rustic strength and bloom.”

Thinking they are alone, Lily and Joe begin to speak. Lily says that she’ll be leaving town, and Joe replies, with feeling, “I ain’t got a word to say.” He then says that he’s not sorry about what happened yesterday, when the two of them had “let on how [they] felt about each other.” But he also says that he can’t break the heart of the woman who’s waited for him for fourteen years. To this, Lily responds that if Joe were to leave Louisa, she wouldn’t love him anymore, and Joe insists that this would never happen. Lily responds: “honor’s honor, an’ right’s right,” again insisting that she’d never accept any man who left another woman for her.

Joe again insists that he is not leaving Louisa. He and Lily’s emotions are heightened and their voices “almost angry.” Louisa continues to listen. Joe does admit that he wishes Lily wasn’t going away, but she insists that it’s best. Joe asks her if she’ll “fret” much over him, to which Lily says that she won’t be worrying over a married man. However, her tone changes, and she says kindly that she won’t ever marry another man, promising “I aint that sort of girl to feel this way twice.”

After Lily says this, Louisa hears a “soft commotion” from where Joe and Lily are sitting. Then Lily stands up and insists they “put a stop” to what they’re doing and says she is going home. Louisa is “dazed” by what she’s heard, and she makes her way home.

The next day, Louisa goes about all of her house chores, but she does not work on her wedding dress. She meditates by the window. Later that night, Joe comes by. Louisa summons all the “diplomacy” she can muster and breaks up with him. She is still a little stunned and is almost unsure if she heard them correctly the night before. Nonetheless, she does not want to betray the fact that she is happy to break the engagement, and she does not mention Lily Dyer, only saying that she couldn’t see herself making such a change as to marry Joe, seeing as she’d lived for so long in one certain way.

Joe responds honestly, saying that he does agree it might be better this way. But he underscores the fact that it is Louisa, not he, backing out of their marriage. He says, “I never shrank, Louisa…I’d have stuck to you till my dying day.” She replies that she knows. When the two say goodbye that night, it is “more tenderly” than it had been for a long time. The two are both moved by their parting.

Once alone again in her home, Louisa weeps briefly. However, the next morning she feels “like a queen” who now, finally, has full and permanent control over her domain. Now, she thinks, she will be able to tend to her tasks as she pleases, Caesar won’t cause any harm and can remain in his hut, and even the canary in the cage won’t be disturbed.

Later, Louisa does her needlework completely at peace. Lily Dyer passes Louisa’s window, and Louisa feels no ill-will towards her. She sees the days ahead of her now like “pearls on a rosary.” Outside, the air is busy and sweet: there is the sound of bees, birds, and men at work. Louisa sits in her home “like an uncloistered nun” contentedly thinking about her future.