Plot Summary
Chapter VI opens the morning after Ethan and Mattie’s intimate evening alone. Ethan feels an irrational happiness despite nothing outwardly changing in his circumstances. With Jotham Powell present at breakfast, Ethan adopts an air of exaggerated indifference, concealing his joy by lounging in his chair and tossing scraps to the cat. He treasures the vision of what life beside Mattie could be and convinces himself that his restraint the previous night preserved the purity of that vision.
The day’s work involves hauling a final load of lumber to the village. Ethan devises a plan: he and Jotham will load the sledge at the wood-lot, then Jotham will fetch Zeena from the Flats while Ethan delivers the lumber and buys glue to repair the broken pickle dish before Zeena’s return. In a brief moment alone with Mattie in the kitchen, he wants to say they will never have this solitude again, but manages only a mundane promise to be home for dinner.
Fate and the elements conspire against Ethan’s plan at every turn. One of the grey horses slips on ice and cuts its knee, requiring Jotham to return to the barn for bandaging. Sleety rain makes the tree trunks dangerously slippery, doubling the time to load the sledge. By the time Ethan reaches the village, Michael Eady’s store is unstaffed and out of glue. He races to the widow Homan’s shop, where she finally produces a solitary bottle from among cough lozenges and corset laces. Her parting remark—“I hope Zeena ain’t broken anything she sets store by”—carries an ironic sting the reader feels more than Ethan does.
Ethan arrives home triumphant but too late. Mattie meets him with the devastating whisper: “Oh, Ethan—Zeena’s come.” Jotham had driven straight on past the farm, delivering goods to his own wife. The two stand staring at each other “pale as culprits.” Ethan hides the glue and promises to mend the dish during the night. Outside, he invites Jotham to stay for supper, wanting the hired man’s “neutralising presence,” but Jotham stolidly refuses—a refusal Ethan reads as ominous. The chapter closes with a deliberate echo of the previous evening: the lamp-lit kitchen, the cat by the stove, and Mattie carrying a plate of doughnuts, repeating her words from the night before—“I guess it’s about time for supper.”
Character Development
Ethan’s internal life reveals a man trapped between desire and passivity. He rehearses bold declarations in his mind—“We shall never be alone again like this”—yet speaks only banalities. His happiness is explicitly “irrational,” built on nothing concrete, highlighting how starved he is for emotional connection. When obstacles mount, he responds not with ingenuity but with frantic acceleration, and when the worst happens he immediately defaults to secrecy (“I’ll come down and mend it in the night”).
Mattie mirrors Ethan’s emotional rhythm—singing over the dishes after his departure, then clutching his sleeve in panic at Zeena’s return. Jotham Powell, though a minor character, functions as a social barometer; his emphatic refusal to stay for supper signals that something significant transpired on the drive from the Flats, forecasting trouble in the chapters ahead.
Themes and Motifs
Fate and environment versus human agency dominates the chapter. Every practical plan Ethan forms is systematically undone by ice, sleet, an injured horse, and absent shopkeepers. Wharton portrays a universe in which small-town New England winter is not merely a backdrop but an active antagonist, making human will appear futile.
The motif of concealment intensifies. The broken pickle dish must be hidden and repaired; Ethan hides his feelings behind indifference at breakfast; Mattie whispers rather than speaks; and the glue itself becomes a symbol of the desperate, fragile effort to paste together appearances before scrutiny arrives.
Repetition and doubling appears in the chapter’s closing scene, which deliberately mirrors the previous evening—same lamp, same fire, same cat, same words—but now drained of intimacy by Zeena’s unseen presence upstairs.
Literary Devices
Irony operates on multiple levels. The widow Homan’s innocent remark about Zeena breaking something “she sets store by” is deeply ironic, since the pickle dish is already broken and its destruction symbolizes far more than crockery. Ethan’s “grim flash of self-derision” about weighing probabilities is retrospective irony, signaling that the calculus of glue and train schedules was trivial beside the larger catastrophe to come.
Pathetic fallacy is pervasive: the “sour morning,” the sleet turning to steady rain, and the roads turned to glass all externalize the characters’ emotional deterioration. Simile enriches the domestic scenes—Mattie’s steam-curled hair is compared to “tendrils on the traveller’s joy,” a vine whose name itself suggests the wandering freedom Ethan craves. The final image of Ethan and Mattie standing “pale as culprits” is a simile that functions as foreshadowing, casting their innocent attachment in the language of crime and guilt.