Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

At this I uttered a protest. "No, no, Fay, you and Frank are mistaken there. Annabel is a most straightforward person, and I am sure I try to be. It isn't fair to say that we pretend."

"Oh, I don't mean that you swank exactly: you take in yourselves more than you take in anybody else. But, as Frank says, you cook up everything and flavour it to taste, till there's nothing of the original left. It's much better to face facts as they are, and try to make the best of them, than to invent a heap of imaginary circumstances to fit in with your own prejudices. You and Annabel live in painted scenery—not in a real landscape: but I'll do you the justice to admit that you believe the painted slips are real trees, and that the lake in the distance is real water. Frank says you do. But when the time comes for you to climb them and wash in it, you'll find your mistake."

I was beginning to find it already, and I felt sick with misery. I had tried so hard to be a good husband to my darling, and to make her as happy as she had made me: but it seemed that I was foredoomed to fail in that as in everything else.

By this time Fay had risen from her chair and was standing with her back to the fire. She looked more like a daring and defiant boy than a dutiful and devoted wife. Her resemblance to Frank just then was very marked; more so than I altogether liked, for although even now I could not help being fond of my brother-in-law, I by no means either admired or approved of him. I held out my arms to my wife, but she eluded me with a boyish gesture.

"Now, Reggie, don't begin to be spoony, for I'm not in the mood for it. You've got hold of a ridiculous masculine notion that kisses make up to a woman for anything: but they don't. But because you think they ought to, you imagine that they do; which is you all over! As Frank says, you take all your thoughts and feelings, while they are in a liquid stage, and pour them into moulds, like jellies and blancmanges: and then your persuade yourself that they grew of themselves into those stiff and artificial shapes. And now you are trying to do the same with mine, and I simply won't have it. No mental and spiritual jellies and blancmanges for me!"

I felt that I could not cope with Fay in this new mood: she was beyond me: so I just let her have her say.

"You and Annabel have concocted a scheme," she went on, "that it is correct for a girl of nineteen to enjoy foreign travel, and improving to her mind to see strange countries: and that, therefore, the South of France must be the one thing that I yearn for. But as a matter of fact, I don't yearn for it at all: it would bore me to death, and I'm not going there. Why should I do things that I hate, because you and Annabel have decided that I ought to enjoy them, and therefore that I do? In the same way Annabel has decided that the East wind ought to give you a cold on your chest, though as a matter of fact it never does: but you don't dare to face it, for fear of offending Annabel by not catching cold when she expected you to."

I had believed that it was Annabel alone who was fussy about the East wind, and that I was laughing at her from my superior height: but now I learned my mistake.

"What I do enjoy," continued my angry darling, "is acting with Frank and the Loxleys: and I mean to do it, too. And if you and Annabel want to go to your fusty old South of France for Easter, go: but leave me at home with Frank, who will be back by then." And she tossed her curly head and dashed out of the room.

For a few seconds I sat absolutely stunned by this unexpected outburst: and then I stretched out my arms on the table in front of me, and buried my head in them, so as to shut out the sight and the sound of everything: for I felt that my world was tumbling down about my ears.