It is the seventh year. The wife is still doing exactly what she did in
the fifth and sixth years. Her daily routine is exactly the same. Except
that she can afford extra little luxuries now, and indulge in more
expensive kinds of pleasure--stalls at the theatre instead of seats
in the pit, an occasional visit to the opera, an easy yielding to
temptations in the way of hats. Her husband has been “getting on,” and
he is glad to give her what she wants.
But somehow or other she is beginning to realize that she has not got
what she wants. She does not know what she wants, but she knows that
there is a great lack of something in her life. She is still “playing
the game,” but there is no longer the same sport in it. The sharp edge
of her interest in things has worn off. It has been dulled down. She
goes languidly through the days and a matinée jaunt no longer thrills
her with a little excitement. The plays are so boring, full of stale old
plots, stale old women, stale old tricks. She is sick of them. She still
reads a great number of romantic novels, but how insufferably tedious
they have become! How false they are! How cloying is all this sickly
sentiment! She searches about for the kind of novel which used to
frighten her, problem novels, dangerous novels, novels dealing with real
problems of life. They still frighten her a little, some of them, but
she likes the sensation. She wants more of it. She wants to plunge
deeper into the dangerous problems, to get nearer to the truth of
things. She broods over their revelations. She searches out the
meaning of their suggestions, their hints, their innuendoes. It is like
drug-drinking. This poisonous fiction stimulates her for a little while,
until the effect of it has worn off and leaves her with an aching head.
Her head often aches now. And her heart aches--though goodness knows
why. Everything is so stale. The gossip of her women friends is, oh--so
stale! She has heard all their stories about all their servants, all
their philosophy about the servant problem in general, all their shallow
little views about life, and love, and marriage. She has found them all
out, their vanities, their little selfish ways, their little lies and
shams and fooleries. They are exactly like herself. She has been brought
up in the same code, shaped in the same mould, cut out to the same
pattern. Their ideas are her ideas. Their ways of life her ways. They
bore her exceedingly.
She is bored by things which for a time were very pleasant. It is, for
instance, boring to go shopping in the morning. It is annoying to her to
see her own wistful, moody eyes in the plate-glass windows, and in the
pier-glasses. She has not lost her love of pretty frocks and pretty
things, but it bores her to think that her husband does not notice them
so much, and that she has to wear them mostly to please herself. She is
tired of the little compliments paid to her by her husband’s middle-aged
friends. She has begun to find her husband’s friends very dull people
indeed. Most of all is she bored by those evening At Homes with their
familiar ritual--the girl who wants to sing but pleads a bad cold, the
woman who wants to play but says she is so fearfully “out of practice,”
the man who asks the name of a piece which he has heard a score of
times, the well-worn jokes, the well-known opinions on things which do
not matter, the light refreshments, the thanks for “a pleasant evening.”
Oh, those pleasant evenings! How she hates them!
She is beginning to hate this beautiful little home of hers. The very
pictures on the walls set her nerves on edge. She has stared at them
so often. She wishes to goodness that Marcus Stone’s lovers on an
old-fashioned stone seat would go and drown themselves in the distant
lake. But they do not move. They sit smirking at each other, eternally.
She wishes with all her heart that the big Newfoundland dog over there
would bite the fluffy haired child who says “Does ‘oo talk?” But it will
not even bark. She stares at the pattern on the carpet, when a Mudie’s
novel lies on her lap, and comes to detest the artificial roses on the
trellis-work. She digs her heels into one of them. If the roses were
real she would pluck them leaf by leaf and scatter the floor with them.
The ticking of the clock on the mantelshelf irritates her. It seems a
reproach to her. It seems to be counting up her waste of time.
She stays more at home, in spite of hating it, because she is beginning
to loathe her round of visits. She feels lonely and wishes her husband
would come home. Why does he stay so late at the office now? Surely it
isn’t necessary? When he comes home she is so snappy and irritable that
he becomes silent over the dinner-table, and then she quarrels with him
for his silence. After dinner he sits over his papers, thinking out some
knotty point of business, which he does not discuss with her as in the
old days. He buries his nose in the evening paper, and reads all the
advertisements, and is very dull and uninteresting. Yet she nourishes
a grievance when he goes off on his club-nights and comes home in the
early hours of the morning, cheerful and talkative when she wants to go
to sleep.