“I could not have believed that a rag carpet could feast me so, and so content me; or that there could be such solace to the soul in wall-paper and framed lithographs, and bright-colored tidies and lamp-mats, and Windsor chairs, and varnished what-nots, with sea-shells and books and china vases on them, and the score of little unclassifiable tricks and touches that a woman's hand distributes about a home, which one sees without knowing he sees them, yet would miss in a moment if they were taken away.”
The narrator is awestruck by the configuration and brilliance of the cabin. As a result, he construes that the Henry’s wife is in charge of the tidiness. Little does the narrator know that the wife is departed. Henry must have preserved the organization of the house, in line with his wife’s predilections, with the expectancy that the wife would be enthralled by it once she comes home.
"All her work," he said, caressingly; "she did it all herself-every bit," and he took the room in with a glance which was full of affectionate worship.
Henry guarantees the narrator that all the things that he views in the cabin are his wife’s workings. The reassurance proposes that the wife is existent. The ‘affectionate worship’ means that the Henry perceives his wife in the adornments in their cabin and he unconditionally appreciates her.
“I'm getting worried, I'm getting right down worried. I know she's not due till about nine o'clock, and yet something seems to be trying to warn me that something's happened. You don't think anything has happened, do you?"
Henry is apprehensive about his wife’s forthcoming advent. He felt the disquiet that day that she did not return home nineteen years ago. Subsequently, the anxiety turned into a cyclic incidence that heralds his break down. He is certain that she will not show up again, because she has never turned up all the nineteen years that he has been anticipating her.Henry's experience in this passage is a regression.
"Boys, I'm sick with fear. Help me -- I want to lie down!"
Here, Henry goes through the Trauma of the Real (Lacanian Criticism). The paleness of his face embodies the concentration of his trauma which stems from the recognition that his Imaginary Order lacks material superintendence over his wife’s re-emergence.
