"The Story of An Hour" word escaped her slightly parted lips.

word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: "free, free,
free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They
stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every
Kate Chopin (1894) inch of her body.

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted
her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death. perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep
again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long
concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in procession of years to come that owuld belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread
the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently her arms out to them in welcome.
Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its
truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There
bearing the sad message. would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women
believe they ahve a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of
accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. illumination.
When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no
one follow her. And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could
love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her
soul. "Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for
the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are
was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and that open window.
piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It
when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
continues to sob in its dreams.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped
strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at
one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a the bottom.
suspension of intelligent thought.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the
not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at
reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills. 
approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as
her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered