Dick and Hilda's Affair

Dick and Hilda's Affair is a recurring relationship between Richard Ellsworth Savage, a young hotel worker and aspiring writer, and Hilda Thurlow, the wife of Edwin Thurlow, a clergyman. It grows out of private conversations during the summer, becomes intimate during Edwin's Sunday absences, and later resumes at the Thurlows' home. The episodes trace a shift from Richard's fearful idealization of forbidden desire toward a more worldly self-image, while showing that the two do not always share the same degree of initiative or willingness.

A private world in summer

Richard had written long letters to Edwin and Hilda through the winter, but meeting them in person left him constrained. In the summer, Edwin went on Sundays to conduct services at a chapel in Elberon, while Hilda stayed behind. She often invited Richard for walks or tea, and the pair formed a private social world in which they discussed Edwin and made fun of him. Their closeness was built not only from attraction but from talk: Hilda described wanting change, travel, fine clothes, and money to spend, and resented the demands of housekeeping and what she regarded as Edwin's mild, unresponsive manner.

The difference between the spouses became part of the relationship's setting. Hilda spoke of feeling that she wanted something to happen in her life and sometimes of being exasperated with Edwin. Richard, who had few chances to speak during her long disclosures, was drawn into the intimacy of being her confidant. On Sundays, after Edwin returned on the 10:53 train, Richard and Hilda ate supper alone and walked beside the beach. She took his arm and walked close to him; he wondered whether she noticed his trembling when their legs touched. The weekly pattern gave anticipation and secrecy a rhythm: Richard thought about those evenings throughout the week, while sometimes resolving not to see her again.

The first intimacy and its aftermath

One moonless Sunday, Richard and Hilda walked beyond the picnickers' fires and sat on the sand talking about a book Hilda had read aloud earlier. Hilda made the first physical advance. Richard initially pushed her away, then drew her close. Their encounter left them both breathing hard, but its immediate consequence for Richard was not uncomplicated pleasure. Hilda told him that she feared a pregnancy they could not afford and said Edwin would not sleep with her for that reason; she also made clear that she wanted Richard. Her account connected their affair to the practical limits of her marriage as well as to her desire for change.

Richard went back to the Bayview without going to meet Edwin at the train, as he usually did. Alone in his room, he feared that he had committed a grave sin and thought of killing himself, then turned to prayer but found he could not remember the Lord's Prayer. The episode shows how sharply his religious understanding of sexuality conflicted with his attraction to Hilda. His distress did not end the relationship. Instead, it became material for a poem about sin and damnation, which he later showed the Thurlows. Edwin regarded the poem's religious resolution as reassuring; Hilda laughed at its morbid ideas and suggested Richard might become a writer.

Secrecy, guilt, and repetition

The affair continued on Sunday evenings when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon. Richard's private response remained divided: he sometimes promised himself he would stay away, yet continued to meet Hilda. In conversation with a fellow hotel worker, he presented himself as a young man in love with a married woman and spoke grandly about women and sin. His companion's more casual view of sex did not displace Richard's moral drama. When they went out together, Richard told one of the women he met about his unhappy attachment and his determination to remain faithful to Hilda, even while describing her as unfaithful to him. The episode exposes the distance between Richard's romantic self-description and the secrecy of the relationship he was sustaining.

That contrast also appears in his response to his companion's later illness. Richard argued that physical consequences mattered less than repentance; the companion subsequently wrote that he was paying a doctor to treat him. The incident does not make Richard's affair safer or more settled. Rather, it records the moral language through which he tried to manage desire and consequence, even as he returned to Hilda. When he went back to school in the fall, he felt worldly, a change in self-image produced by an experience that had first terrified him.

A reversal at East Orange

During Christmas vacation, Richard stayed with the Thurlows in East Orange, where Edwin was assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. Richard spent the week trying to see Hilda alone, but she avoided him. On the final day, Edwin went out on parochial calls, and the earlier pattern of pursuit shifted: Richard took the initiative while Hilda tried to hold him off. The encounter proceeded, and the two were in good humor when Edwin returned, asking what joke had made them laugh. Richard answered with an invented story about his Aunt Beatrice and her boarders, and the visit ended in laughter at the train.

The change in initiative complicates any simple account of the affair as a mutual escape from marriage. In the summer, Hilda had made the first advance and spoken openly of wanting Richard; at East Orange, she resisted while he pressed the encounter. The narrative presents both episodes as part of the same relationship without making their different circumstances interchangeable. Its secrecy is sustained by Edwin's absences, while Richard and Hilda's changing conduct reveals an intimacy that is neither consistently initiated nor experienced in the same way by both.

Significance in Richard's development

The affair joins Richard's early sexual experience to the religious vocabulary through which he first interprets it. His fear after the beach encounter, his poem, and his later assertion that repentance mattered more than physical consequences mark successive attempts to reconcile conduct with belief. Yet the relationship recurs, and by the return to school he regards himself as worldly. That shift is real but incomplete: the Christmas episode shows not a settled romantic partnership but renewed secrecy, altered initiative, and laughter that helps conceal what Edwin does not know.

Hilda's expressed dissatisfaction gives the affair a dimension beyond Richard's coming-of-age story. Her desire for travel, money, clothes, and a life less burdened by housekeeping is voiced directly, while her marriage is described through her complaints about Edwin. The relationship offers an outlet for that discontent, but the narrative does not present it as a resolution. It remains a private arrangement shaped by the Sunday service schedule, interrupted by Richard's schooling, and resumed at the Thurlows' home, leaving desire, guilt, and unequal agency in uneasy combination.