Hilda Thurlow

Hilda Thurlow is a dissatisfied reader and talker whose sharp humor and expressed longing for change unsettle the quiet religious household she shares with Edwin Thurlow. Her relationship with Richard Ellsworth Savage gives those desires a private audience and develops into an intimate encounter, but their connection does not become a lasting alternative to her marriage. When Richard returns to Bay Head, Hilda says that she and Edwin are happy and that she is expecting a child, closing the episode with a reversal of the future Richard had imagined.

Household and Character

The Thurlows live in an unpainted, peaked-roof bungalow on a sandlot near the station. Hilda dislikes Bay Head and speaks openly of boredom. She smokes cigarettes, reads the Smart Set, The Black Cat, and other books described as advanced, and makes fun of Edwin’s efforts to restore what he calls primitive Christianity to the boardwalk. His mild response is to tell her that she ought not talk that way, then reassure Richard that her bark is worse than her bite. The contrast establishes a household in which Hilda’s irreverence is visible but not treated by Edwin as a decisive rupture.

Hilda is not presented only through Richard’s impression of her as wonderful. She voices her discontent directly: she wants something to happen in her life, and speaks of smart clothes and travel to foreign places. Those wishes give her wit and provocation a context. Her dissatisfaction is not simply a joke at Edwin’s expense; it includes a desire for experiences beyond the routine of Bay Head and the expectations of the parish community. The evidence does not show her pursuing those plans, but it makes clear that she can name what she wants.

A Private World with Richard

On Sundays, while Edwin goes to Elberon to conduct chapel services, Hilda stays behind and invites Richard for walks or tea. Their repeated meetings create what the narrative describes as a little world apart from Edwin. They speak about him with teasing familiarity, and Hilda frames her bond with Richard as a kinship between people who are unlike the passionless people around them. Richard, by contrast, has little to say during some of these conversations. The relationship is therefore shaped both by Hilda’s forceful speech and by Richard’s receptive, often hesitant position.

Their closeness has an uneasy consequence for Richard. He thinks about their Sunday evenings through the week and sometimes resolves not to visit again, telling himself that he would be better off reading Dumas or going out with other acquaintances. Being alone with Hilda leaves him feeling troubled afterward. Yet he continues to return. The repeated movement between attraction and attempted withdrawal gives the friendship a private intensity without suggesting that either character has made a settled plan for what it should become.

The Beach Encounter and Richard’s Poem

One moonless night, after walking beyond the picnickers’ fires and talking about India’s Love Lyrics, Hilda initiates a physical encounter with Richard. He first tries to stop her, then reciprocates; afterward, neither speaks. Hilda expresses fear that the encounter could result in a pregnancy. The episode marks a change in their relationship, but the evidence does not establish a promise, a continuing affair, or a future they agree to pursue. Its immediate aftermath is instead shown through Richard’s private reflection and his effort to make the experience into writing.

The following day, while working at the hotel desk and handling guests’ requests for ice water and towels and questions about rooms and train times, Richard turns a poem over in his mind. It dwells on sin, dark birds, waves, and condemned souls. When he shows it to the Thurlows, Edwin wonders where he found such morbid ideas but takes comfort in the poem’s religious resolution. Hilda laughs and calls Richard a funny boy, while suggesting that he might someday be a writer. Her reaction differs from Edwin’s: she treats the poem as a sign of Richard’s possible artistic future rather than primarily as a moral lesson. The scene connects the encounter not to a declared romantic commitment but to Richard’s first effort, in this episode, to turn emotional disturbance into a poem.

Return and Reversal

Richard later spends a two-week vacation with the Thurlows at Bay Head, having eagerly anticipated seeing Hilda again. The household and the relationship have changed. Edwin has become an assistant at a wealthy church on Long Island; his concern is that part of the congregation will not permit chanting or incense, though candles are allowed on the altar. Hilda and Edwin now hold hands at supper. Their public gesture contrasts with the earlier private world Hilda had shared with Richard.

When she and Richard are alone, Hilda tells him that she and Edwin are happy, that she is going to have a baby, and that the past between her and Richard must be left behind. Richard paces and speaks darkly about death, damnation, and going to the devil, while Hilda does not share his response. The scene gives her decision a clear consequence: Richard’s hoped-for return to their former intimacy is refused, and Hilda presents herself as reconciled with Edwin and oriented toward the coming child. The narrative does not report the child’s birth or any later development in their marriage.

Narrative Role

Hilda’s episode is built around a contrast between what she says she wants and the life she later reports choosing. Her boredom, reading, humor, and talk of travel establish an appetite for change; her encounters with Richard briefly make that appetite part of a shared, private life. Yet the reunion shifts the emphasis from possibility to separation: Edwin and Hilda’s joined hands and expected child replace the earlier Sunday invitations and confidential conversations. Hilda remains the clearest speaker of her own desires, while the later outcome is largely registered through Richard’s distress. That difference gives the relationship both its intimacy and its limit: Hilda can provoke and initiate, but the story’s final emotional weight falls on the man who hoped her return would restore what had passed.