Loring had got over the first novelty of having the moon descend to his
crying. Selene was now a domesticated planet. They moved in the same
orbit. He felt, without realising it, somewhat as a lover might feel
who, while gazing entranced at the silver disk in mid-heaven, suddenly
finds himself transported among the Mountains of the Moon. The lunar
landscape, thus familiarly envisaged, struck him as a little bleak.
There was nothing "chummy" about Sophy, he decided. He had always
thought it would be great fun to drink wine freely with the woman one
was in love with. A "bully" dinner after hunting, or a cosy supper after
the play, with plenty of champagne to enliven it. Champagne added such
zest to kisses. He felt aggrieved that Sophy did not care for this form
of bliss. She said that wine "blurred" her. Such a rum expression! He
thought her prudish. He told her so on one occasion.
"Look here, Goddess," he said fretfully. "You run your temple-business
in the ground. You treat love-making like a religious ceremony. Hang
it!-- I can't feel like Cupid's high-priest all the year 'round. Love
ought to be just a bully sort of spree sometimes."
Sophy had said, flushing:
"I'm sorry I seem priggish. But I'm afraid I'll never be able to look on
love as 'just a bully sort of spree.'"
Loring had flushed, too.
"Well ... a chap can't go on playing Endymion forever. I suppose there
was an end even to the Moon's honeymoon!"
It was after dinner one evening during the next winter. As usual, he had
been drinking freely. This always made him either amorous or irritable.
As she would not endure the amorousness, irritability invariably
resulted. Sophy was by this time frankly unhappy. But no one guessed
it--not even Loring. She had come to feel the full weight of that family
remark: "Morry has such a strong will!" She had found that this will of
his was far stronger than his love for her. Yet he loved her still. At
times even the old feeling of worship gave him pause for an instant.
But the steady drinking--cocktails before meals, whiskey-and-soda in
between meals--dulled the edge of finer sentiment. And he resented
passionately the disapproval that her very silence on the subject
evinced.
At first she had spoken out to him about it--with affection, honestly,
as one good friend might speak to another--but when she found how
useless it was, she did not "nag." And she was never "superior" in her
manner towards him.
However, no one, living in the close intimacy of marriage with another,
can loathe a thing as Sophy loathed this constant tippling of her
husband, without the offender being aware of that unexpressed
detestation.
He grew quite callous about it as time went by, but during this second
winter of their marriage it made him very ugly with her at times.
And Sophy had a bitter, ironic feeling when she faced the fact of this
sordid, reduced replica of the tragedy of her first marriage. That had
had the dignity of real peril, at least, but this brought her only the
ignominy of acute discomfort and at times humiliation.
She suffered intensely. That he could not have understood this
suffering, even had she explained it, made her sometimes a little
over-proud and cold. He had his full share of the discomfort. In less
exacting hands, he would have made a rather easy-going if utterly
selfish husband. The climate of Olympus did not at all agree with his
constitution. In the legend, it is said that Endymion, after his
marriage with Selene, was cast out of Olympus by the wrathful Zeus, for
making love to Hera. This lapse was probably caused by the too exacting
standard that Selene held up to her earthly spouse.
But they clashed also in other ways. There was a certain strain of
unconventionality in Sophy, that often outraged Loring's extreme
conventionality of outlook. He had found it "swagger" and amusing that
she should choose to embellish an old house in Washington Square, rather
than follow the social bell-wether "up to the Park." That had been a
"swell" attitude in its way. But there were certain unwritten laws of
"smart" propriety, which to break, he felt, was to risk being
ridiculous. He would have chosen death cheerfully at any time, rather
than seem ridiculous. Sophy felt otherwise. As long as she herself did
not consider what she did ridiculous, she did not think at all of the
opinion of "society."