Emma Barry Read Online Free PDF

instinctive response made him even angrier. She was, as ever, correct. Hang her.
    “Well, if we’ve established that I don’t change, it’s at least a relief to know the same is true of you,” he finally spat out.
    “In what way?” she asked.
    “You too are dissatisfied with your life, are you not? Yet you don’t alter it. You’re ever ready with advice for others, but you don’t take your recommendations to heart.”
    She shook her head. “I’ve not your resources. Your money. Your job. Your sex.”
    “Rarely have I met a woman so gifted.” Theo could see the breath catch in her throat. As angry as he was, Margaret equally stirred him. He had difficulty separating out which feelings were the result of her calling him a coward and which were caused by movement in the vicinity of her bosom. It was a stupid emotion to have on any account, but particularly in reference to such a maddening woman.
    This conversation was at an end. He rose. “I apologize. I have permitted my frustration to get the better of me. I can tell you are busy. I shan’t keep you.”
    Margaret looked surprised and hurt, but Theo was already collecting his hat and backing toward the door.
    “Good afternoon!”
    Once on the street, Theo began walking briskly toward his office. He had covered his rendezvous with Margaret by telling Mother he needed to retrieve some documents. Now he had to obtain some fool paperwork or else it would raise her suspicions.
    He jammed his key into the lock and, after a moment’s struggle, managed to open the door. It clanged in protest, but he stomped over to his desk enjoying the ruckus his feet made. As he shifted things around, attempting to find a prop to convince Mother, emotion overcame him and he sat with a thump.
    Margaret was right.
    Here he was, looking for some pretense to hide the fact that he wanted to meet a woman. In a few weeks, he would be forty-years-old. What was he doing?
    Since he had finished college, he had told himself the time for action would come. He had whiled away years on the promise of later. Later had come and gone a thousand times over. From the first, the only thing in his way had been himself.
    He lacked fortitude, certainty, and the capacity to
do
. But he had done, hadn’t he? In countless ways he had erected barriers to change. Out of fear or laziness or complicity, he had been the author of his own misfortune.
    He could have insisted that Mother leave Middletown with him. He could have run for public office. He could have written about the causes close to his heart. He could have worked for change in so many unknown ways because he had never thought to
act
. He had dawdled and dithered and debated. Even a quarter of an hour prior, he had rationalized why he couldn’t serve in the war even as he had articulated precisely why service was so vital.
    Margaret had seen it from the first, hadn’t she? Oh, Margaret.
    He’d given away a lifetime’s happiness because he had thought she would never let him know rest. Without her, he had known nothing but rest. He had been asleep, and her words had awakened him. And how had he repaid her, but with anger and resentment?
    Theo stalked across the room and began digging through a bin of old newspapers. Finally, he found the one with a notice about the organization of new companies for the Fifth Regiment in Middletown. He sat at his desk and began preparing a letter. His life was going to change, starting this instant.
    • • •
    “Tell us why you want to serve as an officer in the Union Army,” Henry O’Brien prompted.
    In the two days since his fight with Margaret, Theo had written expressing an interest in joining a regiment going into the Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, undergone a physical exam, and was now interviewing for the position. It had been a heady blur, particularly since he was trying to keep things from Mother and Josiah at least until the matter was settled.
    The charade would soon end, as settlement of his