A married pair are ostensibly one, but cannot be really so. As a punishment they are condemned to feel thorns when they wish to gather roses. According to the proverb: "Omnia vincit amor" the power of love is so boundless, that if it were allowed uncontrolled sway, the order of the universe would be endangered. It is a crime to be happy, and therefore happiness must be chastised.
Our frivolous friends must have felt something of this, for when they had had a tiff, they reconciled themselves without explanations and without alleging reasons, as though it was not they who were to blame for the discord but a third unknown person who had brought about all the confusion.
They did so on this occasion also, but the peace did not last long. Some days afterwards an indisputable fact was apparent, which in ordinary marriages is accepted with mixed feelings, but in this one met with decided disapproval. The wife was beside herself: "Now you have ruined my career; I shall sink down to the level of a nurse and how shall we support ourselves?"
There awoke in her a personal grudge against her husband which degenerated into hatred. She was an example of the "independent" woman who protests against the supposed injustice of Nature in assigning all the discomfort to her. She forgets that this brief period of pain is followed by an extreme and long-lasting joy which is quite unknown to men.
Here reasonable considerations were naturally of no avail, and when there were no more smiles, the situation became serious. The scenes between them assumed a tragic character, and just at this crisis an action was brought against him for his last-published book, which was confiscated at the same time. Autumn passed, and one felt that the sun had gone. The cheerful top-floor room changed into a never-tidied sick-room—became narrow.
Her hatred increased continually; she could not go into society, nor to theatres, and hardly on the street. What most annoyed her was the fact that the doctor who had been summoned to declare that she had a dangerous disease, hitherto unknown, only smiled, saying that all the symptoms were normal, and ordered soda-water. Instead of an intelligent friend, the Norwegian found a malicious, spoilt, unreasonable child at his side, and longed to be out of all this wretchedness. All conversation ceased, and they only carried on communications by writing. But there is a kind of malice bordering on the disgraceful and infamous, which is hard to define but easy to recognise. That is the original sin in human nature, the positive wish to injure without cause, and without being justified in taking vengeance or exacting retribution. This kind of malice is hardly forgivable.
One day he received a scrap of paper on which something was written which prevented him going to her room again. Then came her ultimatum; she resolved to go to her relations the next day.
"I wish you a happy journey," he answered. In the dusk of the early morning a white form stood by his bedside stretching out its arms pleadingly for forgiveness. He did not move but let it stand there. Then she fell to the ground, and he let her lie, like an overthrown statue.
Whence the soft-hearted man, who was always ready to forgive, derived this firmness, this inhuman hardness, he could not understand, but it seemed to him to be imposed on him from without like a duty, or a fiery ordeal which he must go through. He went to sleep again. Then he awoke and dressed. He entered the empty room and was conscious of the void. Everything was irrevocably at an end!
A severe agitation was needed to bring his ego uppermost, and he resolved to drain a draught which was unsurpassed for bitterness. He went back to his native land, from which he had been banished.