The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield. The distance each way was barely three miles, but the old bay's pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were nearly an hour on the way. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

At the beginning of Edith Wharton's novel, the narrator tells of his first encounters with Ethan Frome, whose (sad, sad, saddy sad) story the narrator goes on tell us.

There's a lot of emphasis on the relationship between character and environment in this passage. The narrator describes Ethan Frome as a silent, sulky sort of guy. But the narrator also makes the point that Frome's personality is a reflection of, and an extension of, the cold landscape. Frome, after all, was born and bred in New England. We know how bitterly cold those New England winters get.

So the narrator suggests that Ethan Frome's environment—literally the cold winters—have shaped his character. He's as cold and dark as the winters he's lived through. Wait a second, Edith Wharton… wouldn't that mean that everyone in Los Angeles is sunny and happy? And we know some miserable people from the City of Angels.

The narrator spends a lot of time describing the landscape here. There's the "firm snow," and the "accumulated snow," and the "frozen woe" of the "mute melancholy landscape." We're not in Hawaii, obviously.

The narrator's emphasis on the physical description of the landscape is significant because it suggests the continuum between Ethan Frome's environment and his personality. We understand Frome better when we understand the cold environment he comes from. It shapes who he is as a person.

Later in the book, we'll see that the (seemingly) only happy memory Ethan has is from the summer. Ethan Frome needs a SAD lamp.