This was my fated life, and I had chosen it. I became more sensitive to
the defects I had once disregarded altogether; I began to associate her
sallow complexion with her temperamental insufficiency, and the heavier
lines of her mouth and nostril with her moods of discontent. We drifted
apart; wider and wider the gap opened. I tired of baby-talk and
stereotyped little fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence from
those wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardly
spoke when we were alone together. The mere unreciprocated physical
residue of my passion remained—an exasperation between us.
No children came to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie’s a disgust
and dread of maternity. All that was the fruition and quintessence of
the “horrid” elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity
that overtook unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would
have saved us; we should have differed so fatally about their
upbringing.
Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now
hard, now tender. It was in those days that I first became critical of
my life and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would
lie awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing
my unsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterprise
and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my
adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an
air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself
into them.