"I've made my plans."
In the end, after six months abroad, Stephen hung out his sign upon the Manning Street wing of Hilda's house and there practiced his profession for seven or eight months in the year. The other months he spent in her train, journeying from one fashionable American and European resort to the other. During these excursions he was idle except for stolen visits to clinics and lectures, and he was constantly unhappy. He still had faith in his own powers and he realized that his best years were passing and that other men and even younger men were winning honors which should have been his. He knew that Hilda believed that she had made generous concessions in allowing him to practice at all. He knew that her friends—though her associates could scarcely be called friends, so light were the ties that bound them—thought him exceedingly lucky, but he believed that his colleagues held him to be a fashionable quack. He held himself to be the most unhappy of men.
Further opposition to his wife's decisions was impossible. He learned before the second month of his married life had come to a close that a woman given to hysteria could not be argued with, could not be made to see reason. His ambition was, he knew now, stronger than his affection and he would never be able to gratify it. He came to envy quiet, poor men like Edward Levis, especially those who remained unmarried, who could live their lives in freedom.
He had one or two grossly unpleasant quarrels with Hilda. Once, after she had laughed at his awkwardness in the presence of an acquaintance, he took her to task for a habit which he found more and more odious.
"The boys at the University used to say that you smoked cigarettes, but I never believed them."
They were alone in his bedroom—whose bare floors and almost blank walls acted as sounding-boards for Hilda's shrill denunciation of his prudishness. Terrified, he closed the door quickly.
Within a year her malady took a not uncommon form. He had been, he realized when the ugly scene was over, very stupid not to have recognized earlier the obsessive jealousy and rage which she must have felt for some time, but he had not dreamed that the young nurse in his office, who was pretty, but ignorant of everything outside her profession, could have attracted more than a casual glance. When Hilda began to accuse him, he listened dumfounded, on his cheek a gray paleness which added ten years to his age.
As he listened to her coarse tirade, the shrill accents seemed to ring like an unpleasant soprano aria against a clearly accented rhythmic bass, the voice of Professor Mayne. He had received the impression from Mayne that the family malady never appeared after early youth, but had he understood him aright? Horrified he looked into an abyss to whose precipitous wall he had come blindly, but with the blindness of a madman or a fool.
"But, Hilda," he said slowly, "I am married to you."