William Henry Devereaux Sr. and Mrs. Devereaux’s Reunion After His Return

William Henry Devereaux, Sr. and Mrs. William Henry Devereaux’s reunion follows a marriage broken by his departure for New York and reshaped by years of distance. When he returns in frail condition after a personal and financial collapse, she does not treat him as merely a painful figure from the past: she insists that familiar surroundings, books, conversation, and a return to teaching may help restore him. Their reunion is at once an act of care and a revelation of the faith she has continued to place in him.

Separation and the life left behind

Not long after the death of Red, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. received a full professorship from Columbia University and accepted it. He was already a celebrated scholar, but the demands of visiting appointments had made his life unsettled, and the university offered a position that promised both prestige and a permanent base. He also began a relationship with a young woman graduate student from his D. H. Lawrence seminar, and settled with her in New York. The move therefore joined professional advancement to the departure that divided him from Mrs. William Henry Devereaux.

The Columbia position carried unusual advantages. The university provided a subsidized apartment within walking distance of campus, a high salary, and a research assistant who took on many duties, including grading the undergraduate class he taught once a year. He edited a prestigious scholarly magazine in name and directed a special library collection, while his principal obligation was to continue producing books. The account of these arrangements makes his departure more than a romantic rupture: it was a passage into an institutionally protected life, with the resources and status to sustain it.

The marriage’s separation lasted so long that William Henry Devereaux, Jr. recognized its duration only when he tried to explain it to Charles Purty. He and his mother had visited New York after hearing of his father’s collapse, but his father was then hospitalized and heavily sedated. In the literal sense, only a couple of months had passed since that visit; in the more meaningful sense, the son had not really seen his father for about five years. The family’s long estrangement had become ordinary enough that its length surprised him when he put it into words.

Return and recognition

Charles Purty had continued courting Mrs. William Henry Devereaux even after William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s return was announced. He had apparently held on to some hope until he saw the reunited couple together. Their ease with one another finally showed him what he had not wanted to accept: that his long pursuit had been futile, and that the woman he loved remained deeply connected to her husband. The narrator reports the change through Charles’s recognition that they were “two peas in a pop.” His withdrawal is an immediate consequence of seeing the couple together, rather than simply hearing that the husband had come back.

Charles also sees the returned man at close quarters. William Henry Devereaux, Sr. cries with an intensity that seems as if it might continue indefinitely, then stops and grins. Mrs. William Henry Devereaux has advised Charles to let the crying run its course rather than intervene. Her instruction suggests familiarity with her husband’s distress and a confidence that it will pass, even when its expression unsettles those around him. Charles admits that her judgment proved right. The scene presents the reunion not as a polished reconciliation but as life with a vulnerable, unpredictable person whom she knows how to meet.

Care, damage, and practical plans

Mrs. William Henry Devereaux attributes her husband’s collapse to the woman he had most recently been involved with, whom she identifies by academic specialty as the Virginia Woolf woman. She says the woman emptied both his checking and savings accounts before abandoning him, leaving him nearly penniless. Her account comes from the wife, and the novel presents it as her conviction rather than independent confirmation. She places the affair within a succession of relationships she remembers by their scholarly fields: the D. H. Lawrence student for whom he left her, followed by a Brontë specialist, a Joseph Conrad specialist, and finally the Virginia Woolf specialist.

Despite the damage she believes this latest relationship caused, Mrs. William Henry Devereaux’s response is not to insist that her husband remain hospitalized or to keep him at a distance. She rejects the hospital’s apparent view that he is over the episode and argues that what he needs is normalcy: familiar surroundings, his books, and someone with whom he can discuss matters important to him. She also recognizes a practical limit: he cannot resume teaching until the fall. Rather than treating that delay as a reason to abandon the idea, she plans around it.

Her plan is to have him teach one course per semester at West Central Pennsylvania University. She has arranged to discuss the matter with the university’s chancellor, an old friend, and expects the chancellor to instruct the administrator in charge to make the appointment. She regards her husband’s name and scholarly stature as sufficient credentials, while the question of his formal designation can be settled later. The proposal is both concrete and revealing: she imagines a place for him in the university and trusts that his intellectual identity can be restored through teaching.

The meaning of the reunion

The house gives her faith a visible setting. In the formal dining room, floor-to-ceiling bookcases make the room resemble the scholarly world she imagines her husband might again inhabit: one with graduate students, visiting writers, and faculty eager to hear his ideas. The actual university has no graduate students of the kind she envisions and no budget for visiting dignitaries. Yet her pleasure in the room is not simply a mistake about institutional reality. As the narrator understands it, she is looking at her own faith, and the smile that appears on her face carries the force of vindication.

That faith does not erase the history of abandonment or establish that the marriage has been repaired in every respect. The evidence instead shows a return to shared space, her continued emotional investment, and a determined effort to give her husband an ordinary structure in which to recover. The long absence is measured not only in years apart but in the son’s realization that he had scarcely seen his father even when he had recently visited him. Against that distance, Mrs. William Henry Devereaux’s plan—to bring him home, surround him with books, and make room for one course of teaching—becomes the reunion’s decisive gesture. She acts as though a life together can still be resumed, and her confidence forces the family to reckon with how much of their bond has endured.