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.