"Kid," I said, "you are quite right. I do criticise everything and
everybody, but a better word is analyse; I analyse myself and then I try
to analyse you."
"As a boy," I added, "my chief pastime was buying sixpenny watches and
tearing their insides out to see how they worked ... but I never saw how
they worked."
"Yes," she said, "and that's what you would do if you had a wife; you
would tear her to bits just to see how she worked ... and you would
never find out how she worked either."
"Perhaps I might," I said with a smile. "When I dissected watches I was
inexperienced; nowadays I could take a watch to pieces and find out how
it worked. Perhaps I might manage to put my wife together again,
Margaret."
"There would be one or two wheels left over," she laughed.
"I should like her better without them," said I.
"Oh!" she cried impatiently, "why can't you be like other men? What's
the use of looking into the inside of everything? Look at father; he
never bothered about what mother was; he just thought her perfect and
look how happy he is!"
"Ah!" I said teasingly, "I understand! You don't want a man to analyse
you in case he discovers that you aren't perfect!"
She looked at me frankly.
"I wouldn't like to be thought perfect," she said slowly. "I sometimes
think that mother would think far more of father if he saw some faults
in her."
"I am quite puzzled," I said; "you grumble because I analyse people and
now you grumble because your father doesn't. What do you mean, child?"
But she shook her head helplessly.
"Oh, I don't know," she cried, and she sat for a long time in deep
thought.
As I sat by her side in the picture-house tea-room I recollected a
saying of her's one day last week. I was sitting at the bothy door
reading _The New Age_, and at my feet lay _The Nation_ and _The New
Statesman_. She picked up _The Nation_ and glanced at its pages.
"I don't know why you waste your money on papers like that," she said
petulantly. "You spend eighteenpence a week on papers, and father only
gets _John Bull_ and _The People's Journal_."
It suddenly came to me that Margaret was not thinking of the money side
of the question at all; what annoyed her was the thought that these
papers were a symbol of a world that she did not know. And now I wonder
whether woman is not always jealous of a man's work. It is a long time
since I read _Antony and Cleopatra_, but I half fancy that Cleopatra was
much more jealous of Antony's work than of his wife.