“Paul, listen to me!” she was crying desperately as these thoughts went through his head. “Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we’ve been living since we were married, and you must see that something’s all wrong. I never see you—never, never, do you realize that? except when you’re in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and when I’m just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don’t really like—or rather people about whose real selves we don’t know enough to know whether we like them or not—we have them because they’re influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they can help us to get on—or can be smoothed over so they won’t hinder our getting on. And there’s no prospect of doing anything different from this all the days of our life—”
“But, look-y here, Lydia, that’s the way things are in this world! The men have to go away the first thing in the morning—and all the rest of what you say! I can’t help it! What do you come to me about it for? You might as well break out crying because I can’t give you eyes in the back of your head. That’s the way things are!”
Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. “That’s what everybody’s been telling me all my life—but now I’m a grown woman, with eyes to see, and something inside me that won’t let me say I see what I don’t—and I don’t see that! I don’t believe it has to be so. I can’t believe it!”
Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing ideas. “Why, Lydia, what’s the matter with you? You sound as though you’d been reading some fool socialist literature or something.”
“You know I don’t read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn’t understand it if I read it, not having any education. That’s one thing I want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children’s sake. I can’t see that we’re learning to be anything but—you, to be an efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as though we had more money than we really have. I don’t seem really to know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why shouldn’t we have time—both of us—to read their books; and you could help me know what they mean?”
Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia’s pale face like a blow. “I gather, then, Lydia, that what you’re asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialist literature with you?”
His wife’s rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: “I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I’m so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I’ve heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can’t be changed if people would really try—”
“Good heavens! I said that of business conditions!” shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.
“Well, if it’s true of them—No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don’t really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me—really sharing—as you do about getting the Washburn contract—”
Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. “Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can’t blame you for it. But I can’t help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you—why, I give it to you entire!” His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. “What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child—our children! Good Heavens! What more can I do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband’s time and endurance and capacity for work.”