He flushed up rather guiltily. He even seemed to resent my questioning him. But I insisted on an answer.
“No, I sat up,” he finally confessed.
“Why?” I demanded.
And still again his eye tried to evade mine.
“We’re a bit short of ready cash.” He tried to say it indifferently, but the effort was a failure.
“Then why didn’t you tell me that before?” I asked, sitting up and spurning the back-rest.
“You had worries enough of your own,” proclaimed my weary-eyed lord and master. It gave me a squeezy feeling about the heart to see him looking so much like an unkempt and overworked and altogether neglected husband. And there I’d been lying in the lap of luxury, with quick-footed ladies in uniform to answer my bell and fly at my bidding.
“But I’ve a right, Dunkie, to know your worries, and stand my share of ’em,” I promptly told him. “And that’s why I want to get out of this smelly old hole and back to my home again. I may be the mother of twins, and only too often reminded that I’m one of the Mammalia, but I’m still your cave-mate and life-partner, and I don’t think children ought to come between a man and wife. I don’t intend to allow my children to do anything like that.”
I said it quite bravely, but there was a little cloud of doubt drifting across the sky of my heart. Marriage is so different from what the romance-fiddlers try to make it. Even Dinky-Dunk doesn’t approve of my mammalogical allusions. Yet milk, I find, is one of the most important issues of motherhood—only it’s impolite to mention the fact. What makes me so impatient of life as I see it reflected in fiction is its trick of overlooking the important things and over-accentuating the trifles. It primps and tries to be genteel—for Biology doth make cowards of us all.
I was going to say, very sagely, that life isn’t so mysterious after you’ve been the mother of three children. But that wouldn’t be quite right. It’s mysterious in an entirely different way. Even love itself is different, I concluded, after lying there in bed day after day and thinking the thing over. For there are so many different ways, I find, of loving a man. You are fond of him, at first, for what you consider his perfections, the same as you are fond of a brand-new traveling bag. There isn’t a scratch on his polish or a flaw in his make-up. Then you live with him for a few years. You live with him and find that life is making a few dents in his loveliness of character, that the edges are worn away, that there’s a weakness or two where you imagined only strength to be, and that instead of standing a saint and hero all in one, he’s merely an unruly and unreliable human being with his ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. But, bless his battered old soul, you love him none the less for all that. You no longer fret about him being unco guid, and you comfortably give up trying to match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still love him, but you love him differently. There’s a touch of pity in your respect for him, a mellowing compassion, a little of the eternal mother mixed up with the eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you will no longer demand the impossible of him. Being a woman, you will still want to be loved. But being a woman of discernment, you will remember that in some way and by some means, if you want to be loved, you must remain lovable.