“I’ve got to say it. And I’ll say more. It’s a relief to speak where your honesty is known, and no false meaning is put to your words. I’ll say this, that I made a dreadful mistake, and every year that goes over my head will show it clearer. I can bear it, of course. We women are built to suffer and keep our mouths shut. It’s only men that run about with their troubles. Yes, I can bear it, Jordan, and I shall bear it to my grave; but it’s hard for a girl of my age to look ahead through all the years of her life and see nothing but dust and ashes. And though I’m brave enough to face it, I’m too frank and open-natured to hide it, and the bitter thing is that people guess that I’m not happy.”
“Don’t put it as strongly as that, Medora. Don’t actually say you’re an unhappy woman.”
“You’re either happy, or else you’re not—at any rate, when you’re young,” she said. “I see the old get into a sort of frozen condition sooner or later, when they’re neither one nor the other, being sunk to a kind of state like a turnip in ground; but the young are different. They feel. Why, Daisy, only a few minutes ago, saw my mind was troubled, though I tried ever so to hide it. You know people know it.”
“I won’t deny that. Everybody’s more or less sorry. But between husband and wife, of course, no wise man or woman ventures to come.”
“Yes, they do,” she answered. “My own mother for one. Kindness made alive to everybody else no doubt, but not to me. She doesn’t blame my husband anyway, so she must blame me, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t say that. It may be no matter for blame—just the point of view. The great thing is to get at a person’s point of view, Medora.”
“And don’t I try? Don’t I interest myself in Ned? I’ve got a brain, Jordan.”
“I know that very well.”
“And I can’t help seeing only too bitter clear, that my husband’s not interested in anything that wants brains to it. He’s all for sport and talk and pleasure. I like to think about interesting subjects—human nature and progress, and the future of labour, and so on. And if I try to talk about anything that really matters, he just yawns and starts on shooting birds and football. For the less brains a person has got, the more they want to be chattering. I’ve married a boy in fact, when I thought I’d married a man; and my charge against Ned is that he hid the truth of himself from me, and made me think he was interested in what interested me, when he was not.”
She had mentioned the subjects which she knew attracted Jordan. It was indeed his wearisome insistence on such things that had made her turn of old to the less intelligent and more ingenuous Dingle. In reality she had no mind for abstractions or social problems.