You, in America, with your semi-detached ideas of marriage, which enable you to bear six months' or a year's separation without any sinking of heart, or vague questionings, must naturally find it difficult to realise our point of view. With us marriage is "for keeps," as you say, and when upheaval comes, it seems always to spell disaster.
Perhaps our theory is all wrong, and an unwarrantable interference with the freedom of the individual. But I can't be happy thinking of Himself with a whole lot of new interests I can't share, making shoals of friends, which is as easy to him as breathing the air, friends whom probably I shall never see. He can guess pretty well what I am about, but I can't visualise him. Just think of the hundreds of wives, and of other women who are feeling like this, and who are at war with the war, that has brought it about.
There is another side to the picture, the side that proves the part truth of your assertion that we don't bring up our husbands properly. Let me present a little cameo of the times in which we live. I was at a war tea at a women's club in London the other day, and there met an old acquaintance I had not seen for some time. She was quite middle-aged—and had been rather dowdy, not paying much attention to her clothes. Before I spoke to her, I was arrested by a subtle change in her outward appearance. She had a smart suit on, and wore a distinctly youthful hat with a rakish air.
The thing interested me, and I had to find out its meaning.
When we exchanged greetings she informed me that her husband, retired, had gone back to professional work, which meant that he could not live at home, but at a military Headquarters.
I sympathised and asked how she got through the lonely days which I was feeling so desperately. She looked at me queerly through her shrewd candid grey eyes.
"Oh, I'm not lonely," she assured me. "In fact, entre nous, I'm having the time of my life."
"Tell me about it," I asked breathlessly, and she told——
"Well, I go out and in as I like, do all the things I have always wanted to do, but could not. Nobody now asks me where I've been or what I've spent. In fact, I don't really think I have any more use for Dan."
There, Cornelia—it will make you smile, perhaps, but there is a tragedy behind it. Poor old Dan! comfortable, complacent, no doubt inflated by a new sense of his own importance because his country still needs him, to what strange and hostile atmosphere will he return! I can imagine him rubbing his eyes and wiping his pince nez and saying, "Tut, tut, this will never do!"