Marriage is the most turbulent state I could have imagined! Whether or not Alathea and I will ever get the tangle straightened out I am not certain. Now as I write—Saturday afternoon, the ninth of November, 1918—it looks as if we were parted forever, and I am so irritated and angry that as yet I feel no grief.
The quarrel all arose from my fault, I suppose. When Alathea came into the sitting-room at about ten o'clock she had blue circles round her eyes, and knowing what caused them I determined to ask her about them and disturb her as much as possible! This was mean of me.
"You poor child! You look as if you had been crying all night. I do hope nothing is troubling you?"
Her cheeks flushed.
"Nothing, thank you."
"Your room cannot be properly aired then, or something. I have never seen you looking so wretchedly. I do wish you would be frank with me. Something must have worried you. People don't look like that for nothing."
She clasped her hands together.
"I hate this talk about me. What does it matter how I look, or am, so long as I do the things I am engaged for?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "I suppose it ought not to, but one has a feeling that one hates anyone under one's roof to be unhappy."
"I am not unhappy. I mean not more unhappy than I have always had to be."