And for the sake of mutter-schutz, if for nothing else, it must be kept that way. For marriage, to the wife who is a mother as well, impresses me as rather like the spliced arrow of the Esquimos: it is cemented together with blood. It shows a rent in the dyke, a flaw in the blade, a breach in the fortress-wall of faith. It shows the wind is not blowing right in the home circle. No husband whose heart is right stands holding another woman’s shoulder and tries to read her shoe-numbers through her ardently upturned eyes. He was my husband, I kept reminding myself. And now he was scrambling that precious collection for a cheap omelette of amorous adventure. He was the husband to whom I’d given up the best part of my life, the two-legged basket into which I’d packed all my eggs of allegiance. He had said what he did with deliberate intent to hurt me, for it was only too obvious that he was tired of being on the defensive. The man I’d wanted to live with like a second Suzanne de Sirmont in Daudet’s Happiness had not only cut me to the quick but was 3 rubbing salt in the wound. But this was much more than a matter of barometers. At the end of a long winter, I knew, tempers were apt to be short.
A belated March blizzard was slapping at the panes and cuffing the house-corners. I turned to the window, to the end that my Eliza-Crossing-the-Ice look wouldn’t be entirely at his mercy. Well, she doesn’t make love like a frog, he retorted with his first betraying touch of anger. When I suppose you’d rather see me cleverly stupid? he found the heart to suggest.īut that woman, to me, always looked like a frog, I protested, doing my best to duplicate his pose of impersonality. I stood turning this over, exactly as I’ve seen my Dinkie turn over an unexpectedly rancid nut.Īren’t you, under the circumstances, being rather stupidly clever? I finally asked. They’re quite appetizing, you may be sure, or they’d never be eaten! But if you’d really examine these edible nests you’d find they were made of surprisingly appealing and succulent tendrils. I mean that, being married, you’ve run away with the idea that all birds’ nests are made out of 2 mud and straw, with possibly a garnish of horse hairs. Just what do you mean by that? I demanded, resenting the fact that he could stand as silent as a December beehive before my morosely questioning eyes. On much the same principle, he quietly announced, that the Chinese eat birds’ nests. If he saw my shudder, he paid no attention to it. "But the thing I can’t understand, Dinky-Dunk, is how you ever could."Ĭould what? my husband asked in an aerated tone of voice.Ĭould kiss a woman like that, I managed to explain.ĭuncan Argyll McKail looked at me with a much cooler eye than I had expected. Sunday the Fourteenth Friday the Eighth of March Published by Good Press, 4064066209766 Table of Contents
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