Summary
In the car, Mr. Foster details his plans for the next six weeks: he has sent the entire serving staff away, and plans to live at the country club in his wife's absence. Mrs. Foster promises to write him once a week, but Mr. Foster says he likely will not write her because he does not like to write letters. Mrs. Foster expresses concern that she is going to miss her flight, and Mr. Foster repeats that the fog will likely cause the flight to be cancelled, but if it does not, she will likely miss it. Mrs. Foster is keenly aware that Mr. Foster is watching her eye twitch.
At the airport, Mrs. Foster finds out her flight is delayed. She tells Mr. Foster not to wait, and he agrees, leaving her at the airport. She continues to wait and check on the status of the flight, which is eventually delayed until 11 the next morning. Mrs. Foster calls Mr. Foster to tell him the news, saying she will book a hotel near the airport. He insists she come back home and stay with him for the evening, and she does so.
Back at the house, Mr. Foster tells Mrs. Foster that he has already arranged a car to pick her up at 9 AM the next morning. He also says that the car will drop him off at the club first, but Mrs. Foster notes that the club is in the opposite direction of the airport. Mr. Foster tells her she will have plenty of time, and she relents.
The next morning, Mrs. Foster is ready early, and Mr. Foster is delaying them once more. When he finally joins Mrs. Foster in the car, he tells the chauffeur to wait because he cannot find the present he wanted Mrs. Foster to bring to their daughter.
Analysis
This story features a persistent tension between Mr. and Mrs. Foster, particularly one in which Mr. Foster refuses to listen to his wife at all. As Mr. Foster repeatedly states that Mrs. Foster's flight will be cancelled, she practically begs him to stop saying so, her worry and anxiety clearly mounting. Mr. Foster's response, however, is to continue expressing his certainty that she will not be flying today. This flagrant disregard for his wife's mental state further indicates that Mr. Foster possesses ulterior motives and is actively trying to increase Mrs. Foster's suffering. "She knew that her husband was still looking at her," the narrator says as the two travel in the car together. "She glanced at him again, and this time she noticed with a kind of horror that he was staring intently at the little place in the corner of her left eye where she could feel the muscle twitching" (30). This moment is perhaps the definitive moment when Mr. Foster's feigned ignorance is dismantled: Mrs. Foster herself recognizes that Mr. Foster can see the physical toll her stress is taking on her, and yet he continues his assertions that the flight will be cancelled, and if it is not cancelled, Mrs. Foster will surely miss it. That Mrs. Foster realizes her husband's glance with "horror" suggests that she herself is shocked by the disturbing reality that her husband could be behaving with purposeful cruelty.
While this section of the story provides further hints at Mr. Foster's clandestine cruelty, it also illustrates the extent of Mrs. Foster's meekness and obliging personality. Over and over again, Mrs. Foster expresses her desire, only to be met with dismissal from Mr. Foster—dismissal that leads to her acquiescence. When she expresses interest in renting a hotel room, Mr. Foster convinces her to come back to their house in Manhattan. Similarly, when she informs Mr. Foster that the club is in the opposite direction of the airport, he convinces her to drop him off there the next morning anyway. These interactions help to further characterize Mr. Foster as the malicious antagonist, to be sure, but they also characterize Mrs. Foster as the enabling protagonist. In other words, the story suggests that the problems in their relationship exist in a cycle: Mrs. Foster is too meek to challenge Mr. Foster in any significant way, and thus he proceeds with his secret cruelty. Furthermore, both Mr. and Mrs. Foster are governed by the need for upperclass propriety, prohibiting them from speaking honestly with one another. At this point in the story, the repeated tense but polite interactions between the Fosters suggest that something—or more likely, someone—must change in order to break this unhealthy cycle.
