Theodore Dreiser’s “Free”—a novelette first published in the March 16, 1918, edition of “The Saturday Evening Post”—concerns a 60-year-old architect who secretly hopes his unloved and sickly wife will succumb to the liver and heart disease that ails her so that he can be “free” to find the “infinite, inexpressible delight” of true love with another. Sample passage: Always these days, now that she was so very ill and the problem of her living was so very acute, the creeping dawn thus roused him—to think. It seemed as though he could not really sleep soundly any more, so stirred and distrait was he. He was not so much tired or physically worn as mentally bored or disappointed. Life had treated him so badly, he kept thinking to himself over and over. He had never had the woman he really wanted, though he had been married so long, had been faithful, respectable and loved by her, in her way. “In her way,” he half quoted to himself as he lay there. About the author: Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was one of the great American novelists. His best-known works are “Sister Carrie” and “An American Tragedy.”