The Mulberry Bush by Helen Topping Miller

like a simple home dinner, Virginia? I’m going to call you Virginia, too.”
    â€œI am, too, then!” announced Meredith. “May I call you Virginia?”
    â€œOf course,” Virginia smiled at her. “And I love home dinners. I do my own cooking on a gas-plate when I’m at home—and you know what that is.”
    â€œYes, I know,” Avis laughed. “I tried it myself a while. I was a very unimportant music student studying at the conservatory in New York and living in one room and two holes, before I was married. I lived on poached eggs and cereal, with a lamb chop on Sundays. After I married, it took me weeks to realize that men yearned for steaks and French-fried potatoes and apple pie.”
    Bruce had told Virginia that Avis had been a widow for six years. Virginia found herself looking keenly at that calm, cheerful face now, wondering if Avis still had dark and bitter nights, if pain still tore at her when she let herself remember.
    Would there come a day—if, as she would not let herself believe, Mike should be lost to her—when she could sit serenely behind a silver coffee pot and talk about steaks she had broiled for Mike? And yet, undoubtedly, Avis Andrews had loved her husband— passionately, perhaps; undoubtedly, there were moments she took out of memory, as women take little locks of hair and dance programs and wedding invitations from locked boxes, to shed tears over them. She was changed and made into another person because she had loved a man enough to marry him, just as Virginia knew that she herself had been changed in loving Mike. Yet Avis had been able to pick up life again.
    Were there two personalities, two souls in all women? Did they live two lives, separate and untouched, each by the other? It couldn’t be. Love struck too deep, its alchemy touched every cell in brain and body, every fiber of the soul. And if it died, something died that could not live again, forever and ever. Voices would go on speaking and hands go on picking up familiar tasks, laying them down. But deep within, there would be tears that ate like acid and a pain that would not be dulled. Oh, she knew! For that was the way she was feeling now—looking across this pretty table into the smiling eyes of this tall man—who was not her lover, who was not Mike.
    The meal over, they sat before the pleasant fire, and Meredith curled up promptly in the corner of a couch and went to sleep, the little dog in a ball at her feet.
    Bruce said, “Play, Avis.” So without further urging Avis sat at the piano and played haunting things by Debussy and Palmgren, nostalgic, full of questioning and unsatisfied longing; and then the deeper, quieter fulfilment of Saint-Saëns.
    How can she bear it—music like that—Virginia’s thoughts ran.
    Then she glanced at Bruce Gamble to see if he had been caught up in the emotional spell, too, if he, too, was remembering poignant, lost hours. But Bruce was looking at her, with something in his eyes that made her heart quicken a little and her nerves draw tight with an uneasy prescience.
    â€œThat was lovely,” she said, to break the spell. “Oh,” she went on, going to the window, “the rain has stopped.”

Chapter 10
    Bruce came and stood beside her.
    â€œWould you like to walk over with me to see my mother? I usually go on Sundays—it’s only a little way. I’d like her to know you.”
    â€œI’d love it—only my shoes—” Virginia looked do at them ruefully.
    â€œAvis will lend you some overshoes. You’d better get a raincoat, too, Avis; the woods will be drippy.”
    Avis’s raincoat flapped down to Virginia’s ankles and the overshoes were too large, but she tied a scarf over her hair and went out, laughing at the scarecrow figure she made.
    The autumn woods smelled pungently of dead oak leaves, lying light and new-fallen under the trees an in the