Free Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton

did she want to stand it?
All those rest–cures, massages, rhythmic exercises, devised to
restore the health of people who would have been as sound as bells
if only they had led normal lives! Like that fool of a woman
spreading her blond splendours so uselessly at his side, who
couldn't walk upstairs because she had danced all night! Pauline
was just like that—never walked upstairs, and then had to do
gymnastics, and have osteopathy, and call in Hindu sages, to
prevent her muscles from getting atrophied… He had a vision of
his mother, out on the Minnesota farm, before they moved into Delos—
saw her sowing, digging potatoes, feeding chickens; saw her
kneading, baking, cooking, washing, mending, catching and
harnessing the half–broken colt to drive twelve miles in the snow
for the doctor, one day when all the men were away, and his little
sister had been so badly scalded… And there the old lady sat
at Delos, in her nice little brick house, in her hale and hearty
old age, built to outlive them all.—Wasn't that perhaps the kind
of life Manford himself had been meant for? Farming on a big
scale, with all the modern appliances his forbears had lacked,
outdoing everybody in the county, marketing his goods at the big
centres, and cutting a swathe in state politics like his elder
brother? Using his brains, muscles, the whole of him, body and
soul, to do real things, bring about real results in the world,
instead of all this artificial activity, this spinning around
faster and faster in the void, and having to be continually rested
and doctored to make up for exertions that led to nothing, nothing,
nothing…
    "Of course we all know YOU could tell us if you would. Everybody
knows the Lindons have gone to you for advice." Mrs. Toy's large
shallow eyes floated the question toward him on a sea–blue wave of
curiosity. "Not a word of truth? Oh, of course you have to say
that! But everybody has been expecting there'd be trouble soon…"
    And, in a whisper, from the Marchesa's side: "Teasing you about
that mysterious Mahatma? Foolish woman! As long as dear Pauline
believes in him, I'm satisfied. That was what I was saying to
Pauline before dinner: 'Whatever you and Dexter approve of, I approve of.' That's the reason why I'm so anxious to have my poor
boy come to New York … my Michelangelo! If only you could see
him I know you'd grow as fond of him as you are of our dear Jim:
perhaps even take him into your office… Ah, that, dear Dexter,
has always been my dream!"
    …What sort of a life, after all, if not this one? For of
course that dream of a Western farm was all rubbish. What he
really wanted was a life in which professional interests as far–
reaching and absorbing as his own were somehow impossibly combined
with great stretches of country quiet, books, horses and children—
ah, children! Boys of his own—teaching them all sorts of country
things; taking them for long trudges, telling them about trees and
plants and birds—watching the squirrels, feeding the robins and
thrushes in winter; and coming home in the dusk to firelight,
lamplight, a tea–table groaning with jolly things, all the boys and
girls (girls too, more little Nonas) grouped around, hungry and
tingling from their long tramp—and a woman lifting a calm face
from her book: a woman who looked so absurdly young to be their
mother; so—
    "You're looking at Jim's wife?" The Marchesa broke in. "No
wonder! Très en beauté, our Lita!—that dress, the very same
colour as her hair, and those Indian emeralds … how clever of
her! But a little difficult to talk to? Little too silent? No?
Ah, not to YOU, perhaps—her dear father! Father–in–law, I mean—"
    Silent! The word sent him off again. For in that other world, so
ringing with children's laughter, children's wrangles, and all the
healthy blustering noises of country life in a big family, there
would somehow, underneath it all, be a great pool of silence, a
reservoir on which one could always draw