Summary
Mrs. Foster begs Mr. Foster to leave the present behind, saying that it is a comb and he has already given Ellen so many combs. Mr. Foster ignores her, instead saying that he must have left the present in the house. When he goes back inside to look for it, Mrs. Foster finds the box wedged deeply into the car seat. She asks the chauffeur to go retrieve her husband, but the chauffeur says the door is locked. Mrs. Foster gets out of the car with her key and runs to the door. Before she can turn the key however, she pauses and listens intently, her ear moving closer to the door.
Suddenly, Mrs. Foster declares that it is too late, and tells the driver to take her to the airport by herself. She tells him that Mr. Foster will be okay taking a cab to the club. Her demeanor is different; she is no longer anxious but calm, collected, and authoritative.
Mrs. Foster makes it to the airport on time and catches her flight. She spends six weeks in Paris doting on her grandchildren and everyone is sad when she has to leave. But she returns to New York and finds it strange that her husband has not sent a car to the airport for her. She takes a cab home, and notices that the mail has piled up on the floor and there is a peculiar odor in the house. She disappears to a corner of the first floor and emerges with a satisfied expression on her face. She goes to Mr. Foster's office and calls a repair company, telling them that the elevator is stuck between the second and third floors. She sits down and awaits the repairman's arrival.
Analysis
In this final section of the story, the tension between Mr. and Mrs. Foster finally builds to a climax. Notably, however, readers are not entirely privy to what exactly occurs when Mrs. Foster approaches the house. The third-person narrator takes over at this point in the story, leaving distance between the reader and Mrs. Foster that generates mystery and confusion. "The way she was standing there," the narrator says, "with her head in the air and the body so tense, it seemed as though she were listening for the repetition of some sound that she had heard a moment before from a place far away inside the house" (32). That readers do not know precisely what Mrs. Foster is thinking and can only hear the narrator's own speculations suggests that Mrs. Foster's behavior is uncharacteristic and secretive. When readers discover, at the end of the story, that this intent listening Mrs. Foster performed at the doorway was actually her decision to leave her husband trapped in a broken elevator, her uncharacteristic behavior starts to make sense: no longer burdened by her husband's cruelty, Mrs. Foster takes on cruel intentions and deception of her own.
While the story suggests that Mrs. Foster adopts Mr. Foster's maliciousness and feigned ignorance, it also shows how her decision completely transformed her character. As soon as she gets back into the car, the chauffeur himself notices, "that her face had turned absolutely white and that the whole expression had suddenly altered. There was no longer that rather soft and silly look. A peculiar hardness had settled itself upon the features. The little mouth, usually so flabby, was now tight and thin, the eyes were bright, and the voice, when she spoke, carried a new note of authority" (32). Here, the description of Mrs. Foster is one characterized by calmness, strength, and confidence. She has effectively abandoned her meek and obliging nature—conventionally associated with the idealization of passivity in women—for independence and freedom, and her anxiety has immediately disappeared. The story suggests that it was, then, not the notion of punctuality that truly inflamed Mrs. Foster's worry, but instead her husband's presence and sadistic behavior. By presenting Mrs. Foster as a changed and free woman rather than a new type of villain, the story ultimately argues that consistent, repetitive, and small acts of cruelty under the guise of propriety are more condemnable than a single major act of cruelty in response.
