Individual Reading (Part 4)

Dirk Stroeve was very upset, he tried to connect with his wife in different ways, but she didn’t want to see him. The narrator didn’t see Charles Strickland for several weeks but one evening they met in the coffee and Strickland offered to play a game of chess. Mrs. Stroeve watched the game with inscrutable face. Her face was a mask that told nothing. Two days later Dirk Stroeve came to the narrator to ask him to write a letter to Mrs. Stroeve and told her about her husband’s love. Sometime later Stroeve came to the narrator and told him that his wife had committed suicide. She drank a bottle of oxalic acid. This woman had been in the hospital for two weeks. Blanche Stroeve died and when her husband buried her, he left for Holland. Before his leaving Dirk Stroeve met Strickland, who told him a singular story.