“Why don’t you like them?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. They’re not quite—our kind of place.”
“I wish I knew what you meant, Rose-Ann,” he said wistfully.
“I’ll try to tell you,” she said, “on the way home.”
And on the train, she began: “You saw those people on the other side of the hall at that last place we looked at?” The door had been opened by a fat man with a bulging neck, and they had glimpsed an interior of plush and golden oak, and the rather plump and vapid-looking woman who awaited him there. “Well, those apartments are made for people like that—I mean people without imagination. They take such an apartment and buy some of the furniture that is made to go in it, and they settle down and are contented there. Why not! It has a kitchen, a dining-room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a room to sit in and entertain callers. And that is the whole of their existence—cooking, eating, sleeping, washing their bodies, and showing off to their friends. But that isn’t the whole of our existence.—Felix, I would rather we would eat at a lunch-wagon and sleep on a park bench, than make those things the centre of our lives!”
It was not so much her argument that impressed him as the genuine and profound scorn in her tone and manner. He was conscious of a defection of sympathy in himself from the point of view that her words expressed. It might have been himself of a few years ago saying these things so intensely; and yet they seemed like nonsense to him now!
But one could not argue about such things in the midst of a trainload of people, the nearest of whom were already beginning to be too much interested in one’s affairs, so he only said, “Yes—I think I understand.”
But his mind went back to their life in the country—to the cooking of that first breakfast in the kitchen, to their first dinner after walking through miles of snow, to the bed of their happy love and sleep, the tingling snow-baths at dawn, and the fire in front of which they had sat and talked for so many lazy hours—and it seemed to him, without quite understanding why, that Rose-Ann was really denouncing her own life there with him! A kitchen, a table, a bed, a bath, a fire—hadn’t these things circumscribed their life? “People like that,” she had said, bitterly. Who were these people but their own happy selves of the past week? And why had she turned so fiercely against that happiness?
All these things passed through his mind swiftly and vaguely, an emotion rather than a thought: an emotion of mingled anger and pity—a strange anger and a strange pity that he could not understand. Vaguely he sensed the existence in her of a tragically divided mind, torn between the desire to sink deep into the lap of that simple and traditional domesticity she had been experiencing, and the fear of some profound hurt and shame in making that surrender in vain....
But if he sensed this struggle in her, it was not very clearly, and it was obscured by his effort to think the situation out in logical terms. “Confound it,” he thought, “if we live in town, we must live in an apartment—and all apartments are more or less alike. Of course, some are bigger than others. It is probably the cramped space that she objects to, after that house in the country. Well, if I get my raise—let me see....”