Jim looked at him quickly, and felt almost as though he had found a friend. He himself had been dreaming as he sang, and here, at any rate, was one man who had dreamed with him—and they called him the village idiot!
Chapter IX: IN THE WOODS
As in the case of so many unions in which mutual attraction of a quite superficial nature has been mistaken for love, the marriage of Jim and Dolly was a complete disaster. Disquietude began to make itself felt within a few weeks, but many months elapsed before Jim faced the situation without any further attempt at self-deception. The revelation that he had nothing to say to his wife, no thought to exchange with her, had come to him early. At first he had tried to believe that it was due to some sort of natural reticence in both their natures; and one day, chancing to open a volume of the poems of Matthew Arnold which Dolly had placed upon an occasional table in the drawing-room (for the look of the thing) he had found some consolation in the following lines:—
Alas, is even Love too weak
To unlock the heart and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d