内容简介：
I HAD the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the natives were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a hind the grating. I noticed that, though he came so punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsb, ridge Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. At intervals, however, the post-master would hand him an enveIope addressed to Mrs. Zenobia--or Mrs. Zeena-Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the postmaster. Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speakers face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me then he would climb stiffly into Why didnt he Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warnt ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his father-then his mother-then his wife. And then the smash-up Harmon chuckled sardonically. Thats so. He had to stay then. I see. And since then theyve had to care for him Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. Oh, as to that I guess its always Ethan done the caring. Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences Guess hes been in Starkfield too many winters. Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale. Mrs. Hales father had been the village lawyer of the previous generation, and lawyer Varnums house, where my landlady still lived with her mother, was the most considerable mansion in the village. It stood at one end of the main street, its classic portico and small-paned windows looking down a flagged path between Norway spruces to the slim white steeple of the Congregational church. It was clear that the Varnum fortunes were at the ebb, but the two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity and Mrs. Hale, in particular, had a certain wan refinement not out ofkeeping with her pale old-fashioned house...