The Story of an Hour

by Kate Chopin

Because Mrs. Mallard had heart trouble, they were careful to tell her the news of her husband's death very gently.

It was her sister Josephine who told her in half sentences; words that told her what had happened but kept the details secret. Her husband's friend, Richards, was there too, near her. He was in the newspaper office when news of the train accident arrived, with Mr. Brent Mallard's name at the top of the list of "killed." Richards only took time to make sure the story was true before he hurried to stop a careless friend from giving Mrs. Mallard the sad message.

She did not hear the story like many women do, calm because they cannot understand the meaning of the news. She cried immediately in her sister's arms with sudden, mad hopelessness. When the first storm of her sadness ended, she went to her room alone. She wanted no-one to follow her.

A comfortable armchair stood near the open window. She sat down, her tiredness moving from her body into her soul.

She could see the tops of trees in the street in front of her house. They were awake with the life of the new spring. A delicious smell of rain was in the air. In the street, a salesman was shouting. The notes of a song which someone was singing far away reached her, and countless birds were singing in the trees. There were bits of blue sky showing here and there in the clouds.

She sat very still, except when her crying shook her, like a child who has cried himself to sleep continues to cry in his dreams.

She was young, with a pretty, relaxed face. But now there was a dull look in her eyes, which looked into the distance at one of those bits of blue sky. She was not thinking, just looking emptily.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, afraid. What was it? She didn't know; the feeling was hard to name. But she felt it, coming out of the sky, reaching toward her through the noises, the perfumes, the colour that filled the air.

But now she was beginning to understand this thing that was coming towards her, and she was trying to push it away with her self-control – but she was so weak. When she stopped fighting the feeling, a little whispered word escaped from her lips. She said it again and again under her breath: "Free! Free! Free!" The frightened look went from her eyes. They stayed bright. Her blood warmed and relaxed every part of her body. She did not stop to ask if this was happiness.

She knew that she would cry again when she saw her husband's kind, gentle and dead hands; his face that never looked at her without love, grey and dead. But she saw past that terrible moment the long years to come. They would be hers, completely hers. And she opened her arms to welcome them. There would be no-one else to live for during those years; she would live for herself. There would be no strong head trying to make her ideas for her. Kindness didn't make this seem less terrible as she looked at it in that short moment when everything was bright and clear.

She had loved him – sometimes. Often she hadn't. What did it matter? What was love worth against the independence which she suddenly saw as her strongest need!

"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

Josephine was in front of the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, asking to go in. "Louise, open the door! Please open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? Please open the door for me."

"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in life through that open window. Her imagination was running over those days in front of her. Spring days and summer days and all sorts of days that would be her own. She asked for her life to be long. It was only yesterday that she'd thought the same thing with horror.

Eventually she got up and opened the door to her sister. There was victory in her eyes and she moved like a goddess. She held her sister's waist and together they went down the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Someone was opening the front door with a key. It was Brent Mallard who came in, a little dirty from his trip, calmly carrying his briefcase and umbrella. He had been far away from the accident and did not even know there was one. He was shocked at Josephine's cry; shocked at Richards' quick move to stand between him and his wife.

But Richards was too late.

When the doctors came they said she had died of her heart — of the happiness that kills.