Week after week, month after month, I have tried to wean her from the one theme—our mutual affection. I see, I feel more bitterly each hour that she is not in love with me, but with her love for me. I may wrong her affection: God forgive me if I do! But true love is unselfish. Even her love for her father was unselfish.
To-day I have determined to look into the matter. The resolve formed itself in my mind during our walk.
She has an embarrassing habit of multiplying wedding-days: I don’t know what else to call it. For instance, I had to keep the day week of our marriage in a semi-solemn way: in recalling all our sentiments during our betrothal, in reading our old letters, in rejoicing that we had met, etcetera. A charming idea, especially when supplemented by plans for our future management of the Pinewood, our poor people, the tenants and labourers. But, like other habits of inspection and classification, not good when treated with “vain repetitions.” That day fortnight, that day month, the function was not to be cavilled at. But when, the “day five weeks” after our marriage, she raised her eyes in that earnest way when she gave me my first cup of tea at breakfast, and said: “It is five weeks to-day since we were married——”
Well, I had planned to do some work—in fact, to begin my work again; and I said, as gently as I could:
“Yes, dear; and to-day we must give up mooning over the past, and begin to live real, sensible lives.”
I cannot blame myself for the words, nor for my way of saying them. But their effect upon her alarmed me. She became deadly pale, and looked at me as if at the very least I had threatened to kill her.
“Did you say ‘mooning over the past’?” she stammered.
I confessed that I did.
“What do you mean by ‘mooning’?” she asked, imploringly.
“What you are doing now,” I said bravely, for I felt I must begin to bring my darling down to earth a bit. (It was for all the world like pulling a string attached to the foot of some fluttering and unwilling bird.) “You have some romantic idea in your mind. You want to square my life and your life with it. It cannot be done. Life is not a poem in so many cantos. It is work; hard, dry, but honest work.”