Their thoughts....
But we, my love—does a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices? Must we, too, be dumb?
Other lovers, then, had experienced that blank-wall feeling: it was just human nature. But soon he began to realize that in this case the trouble was more serious. He had nothing to say to her. She did not understand him, nor call forth his confidences.
For months he had struggled against the consciousness that he had made a fatal mistake; but at length the horror of his marriage, of his inheritance, and of society in general as he saw it here in England, became altogether too large a presence to hide itself in the dark corners of his mind. It came out of the shadows and confronted him in the daylight of his heart—an ugly, menacing figure, towering above him, threatening him, arguing with him, whithersoever he went. He attributed features to it, and visualized it so that it took definite shape. It had a lewd eye which winked at him; it had a ponderous, fat body, straining at the buttons of the black clothing of respectability; it had heavy, flabby hands which stroked him as though urging him to accept its companionship. It was his gaoler, and it wanted to be friends with him.
At length one autumn day, while he was sitting in the woods among the falling leaves, he turned his inward eyes with ferocious energy upon the monster, and set his mind to a full study of the situation it personified.
In the first place, Dolly held views in regard to the position and status of wife which offended Jim’s every ideal. She was firmly convinced that marriage was, first and foremost, designed by God for the purpose of producing in the male creature a disinclination for romance. It involved a mutual duty, a routine: the wife had functions to perform with condescension, the husband had recurrent requirements to be indulged in order that his life might pursue its way with the least possible excitement. The whole thing was an ordained and prescriptive business, like a soldier’s drill or a patient’s diet; nor did she seem to realize that there was no room for real love in her conception of their relationship, no sweet enchantment, no exaltation.
Then, again, he was very much disappointed that Dolly had no wish to have a child of her own. She had explained to him early in their married life how her doctor had told her there would be the greatest possible danger for her in motherhood; but it had not taken Jim long to see that a combination of fear, selfishness and vanity were the true causes of her disinclination to maternity. She was always afraid of pain and in dread of death; she always thought first of her own comfort; and she was vain of her youthful figure.
These two facts, that she asserted herself as his wife and that she shunned parenthood, combined to produce a condition of affairs which offended Jim’s every instinct. In these matters men are so often more fastidious than women, though the popular pretence is to the contrary; and in the case of this unfortunate marriage there was an appalling contrast between the crudity of the angel-faced little wife and the delicacy of the hardy husband.
A further trouble was that she regarded marriage as a duality incompatible with solitude or with any but the most temporary separation. One would have thought that she had based her interpretation of the conjugal state upon some memory of the Siamese Twins. When Jim was writing verses in the study—an occupation which, by the way, she endeavoured to discourage—she would also want to write there; when he was entertaining a male friend she would enter the room, and refuse to budge—not because she liked the visitor, but because she must needs assert her standing as wife and as partner of all her husband’s amusements; when he went into Oxford or up to London she would insist on going too; even when he was talking to the gardener she would come up behind him, slip her arm through his, and immediately enter the conversation.