The Awakening

It was summer on Grand Isle, a resort of weathered cottages on the Gulf coast where well-off New Orleans families came to escape the heat.Outside the main house a caged green-and-yellow parrot shrieked the same French phrases over and over, and a mockingbird answered from the far side of the door.Mr. Léonce Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper for the noise, folded it under his arm and walked down to his own cottage.

He was a neat, correct man of forty, with a trimmed beard and a careful part in his hair, and he liked his days to run to a plan.From his porch he looked toward the beach and saw, under a white sunshade, his wife Edna coming back from a swim with a young man named Robert Lebrun.He watched them without much interest, the way a man might glance at a costly thing that belonged to him.

When Edna reached the house she held out her hands for the rings she had left with him, and slipped them back onto her fingers."You are burnt beyond recognition," her husband said, half scolding, looking her over.Edna only laughed, spread out her strong, sunburnt hands, and turned to go on talking with Robert about their morning in the water.

Edna and Robert talked at the same time, laughing, finishing each other's stories, and Léonce could have followed it all if he had cared to listen.He stood up, stretched, and said he was going over to Klein's hotel to play billiards.Edna asked whether he would be back for dinner; he shrugged and said it would depend on the company he found there.

After he had gone, the two little Pontellier boys stayed with their nurse under the oaks, and Edna and Robert settled on the porch steps.They talked for hours, easily and without effort, about the sea, the wind, and the other guests at the pension.Robert spoke of his plan to go to Mexico in the autumn to make his fortune, as he did most summers without ever going.

Edna told him about her father's plantation in Mississippi and the Kentucky bluegrass country where she had grown up.The afternoon slipped by while they talked, and neither of them thought about when Mr. Pontellier might come home.