It is in the third and fourth year that they begin to find each other
out. The bright fires of their passion have died down, burning with a
fitful glow, burning low. Until then they had been lovers to each
other, hidden from each other by the illusions of romantic love. It was
inconceivable that the man could be anything but kind, and tender, and
patient, and considerate. It was inconceivable that he could hold any
but the noblest ideals, the most exalted aspirations, the most generous
sentiments. He had been so wise, so witty, and so gay.
And to the man it had seemed that the woman by his side was gifted with
all the virtues. At least she had been eager to please him, to satisfy
his least desire, to bend to his will. She had pandered to his vanity,
fed his self-conceit, listened to his opinions on all the subjects of
life as though they were inspired. If he had been kept out late at work
he had found her waiting for him, quick to put her arms about him,
to cry out, “Oh, my poor dear, how tired you must be?” She had been
grateful to him for all his little gifts, for all his words of love. And
he had seen her as a beautiful thing, without flaw or blemish. He had
worshipped at the foot of the pedestal on which he had placed her in his
ideals.
But now both the husband and wife begin to see each other, not as
lovers, but as man and woman. It is rather disturbing. It is distressing
to the young wife to discover, gradually, by a series of little
accidents, that this man with whom she has to live all her life is not
made of different clay from other men, that he is made of the same clay.
One by one all the little romantic illusions out of which she had built
up the false image of him, from the heroes of sentimental fiction, from
the dreams of girlhood, are stripped from him, until he stands bare
before her, the natural man. She does not like the natural man at first.
It is quite a long time before she can reconcile herself to the thought
that she is mated to a natural man, with a touch of brutality, with
little meannesses, with moods of irritability, with occasional bad
tempers, when he uses bad words. She sees, too clearly for her spiritual
comfort, that they are not “twin-souls.” They have not been made in
the same mould. His childhood was different from her childhood, his
upbringing from her upbringing. She sees that in little things--mere
trifles, but monstrously annoying, such as his untidy habits, the
carelessness with which he flicks his cigarette ash about the carpet,
the familiarity with which he speaks to the servant-maid. She begins to
dislike some of his personal habits--the way in which he sneezes, his
habit of shaving after breakfast instead of before breakfast, his habit
of reading the newspaper at the breakfast table instead of chatting with
her as he used to do about the programme for the day. In things less
trivial she finds out that her first ideal of him was false. They do not
think alike on the great subjects of life. He is a Radical and she is
Conservative, by education and upbringing. It hurts her when he argues
with revolutionary ideas which seem to her positively wicked, and
subversive of all morality. He has loose views about morality in
general, and is very tolerant about lapses from the old-fashioned
moral code. That hurts her too--horribly. It begins to undermine the
foundations of her faith in what used to seem the essential truth of
things. But, above all, it hurts her to realize that she and her husband
are not one, in mind and body, but utterly different, in temperament, in
their outlook on life, in their fundamental principles and ideas.
On the other side the husband makes unpleasant discoveries. He finds
out, with a shock, that he was utterly ignorant of the girl whom
he asked to be his wife, and that this woman who sits at his
breakfast-table is not the same woman as the one who dwelt in his
imagination, even as the one who lived with him during the first and
second year. She has lost her coyness, her little teasing ways, her
girlish vivacity. She begins to surprise him by a hard common-sense, and
no longer responds so easily to his old romantic moods. He can no longer
be certain of her smiles and her tenderness when he speaks the old
love-words. She begins to challenge his authority, not deliberately, nor
openly, but by ignoring his hints, or by disregarding his advice.
She even challenges his opinions, and that is a shock to him. It is a
blow to his vanity.
It takes down his self-conceit more than a peg or two, especially when
he has to acknowledge, secretly, that she is in the right, as sometimes
happens. He finds out faults in her now--a touch of selfishness, a trace
of arrogance, an irritability of temper of which he has to be careful,
especially when she is in a nervous state of health. They begin to
quarrel rather frequently about absurd things, about things that do not
matter a brass farthing. Some of these quarrels reach passionate heights
and leave them both exhausted, wondering rather blankly what it was all
about. Then the wife cries a little, and the husband kisses her.
By the end of the fourth year they know each other pretty well.