He drew her a series of charming, conventional pictures, steeped in a ruddy glow from the hearth of illusions; a child's laugh, a sundial in a garden, the flicker of lamplight on shelves of books, as needful accessories. He also mentioned, rather shyly, the illuminating spirit of love to lurk beneath outward trivialities; the joy of sharing evil and good alike; the flaming interest to be taken in each other's work, whatever that might chance to be. And he spoke of two as the only magical number in arithmetic; and threw in a Persian cat, to boot. And was silent. He had spoken earnestly and well; eloquence was at all times his strong point.
"Gareth."
"Yes, dear?"
"Do you care to know how I have learnt to see marriage?"
Gareth, in anticipation of her disclosure, shrank from it.
"Oh—please," he said. She mistook the appeal for assent.
"It's a clammy state of familiarity," thus Kathleen defied his fair visions; "familiarity of petty outward things that don't count. Breakfast-table intimacy, with the yolk from an eaten egg smeared yellow on the shell. Intimacy of letters: 'Who's your correspondent?' 'Who are you writing to?' Moving in lumps, undetachable, sticky; waiting about in the hall, and calling irritably up the stairs to know if the other will be long, instead of just—going. It's the shedding of all privacy; bursting into rooms without knocking: Thy room shall be my room! It's to hear a man's bath-water running in the morning, and to know exactly, by sounds, when he gets in and out. To be aware how many shirts he uses per week, because you count his dirty washing. Oh, if I loved a man, I shouldn't yearn for 'the tender privilege of darning his dear socks!' Rather keep him for ever remote, with the mystery still on him. But marriage offers the sight of unmade beds, use of the same piece of soap, pilgrimages to the same friends, the same question every evening: 'What have you been doing all day?' answer to be given in detail. Oh, Gareth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry; your pictures were ever so much prettier, but mine are true."
She paused for response. But the meaning of her tirade had percolated Gareth's mist-bound understanding not a whit. The outburst in itself struck him as harsh and ugly, quite out of keeping with the spirit in which a maiden should receive a declaration of love. She was spoiling something; petulantly he refused to recognize the necessity for its spoiling.
So he made no reply. And less vehemently she went on:
"You mustn't think that all this is because I'm cooped up with an unfortunate example. My brother and his wife are very fond of each other; what the neighbours would call an ideal pair. They see nothing of what I'm telling you; why should they? They're doing it all the time. But it's a mistake to be a perpetual onlooker at marriage when the couple are still young and in the throes. One's mother and father are different; one doesn't regard them as married, merely as parents. But I've lived most of my life a third in a family of three, and been robbed of the—glamour, you would call it, without getting anything in exchange, except a horror of wedded bliss, an utter horror of it. You mustn't ask me to be your wife, Gareth, because I'd be afraid; afraid of all that might happen to you and me; afraid, most of all, of seeing it happen."