At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:
“You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from abominations.”
“Ah!” She too was angry now. “What else is it?”
“By God!” he said. “I thought it led to love.”
And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on hearing his father’s cynicism.
For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext—wished to have some of the rooms papered—and went to stay with her mother.
[XII
ESCAPE]
| Ant. | Come, I’ll be out of the ague, |
| For to live thus is not indeed to live, | |
| It is a mockery and abuse of life. | |
| I will not henceforth serve myself by halves! | |
| Love all or nothing. | |
| Delio. | Your own virtue save you! |
HE spent hours brooding, prowling in the streets, in whose dull monotony his mind had grown so undisturbedly, responding to their small gaieties and smaller excitements, but moving on in the even smoothness of their life. It seemed incredible to him that such turmoil could have come out of them, and yet that turmoil had begun even before his marriage, before he had met his wife. Was there some strangeness in himself? Of his nature he became doubtful and suspicious. Yet the habit of acceptance was too strong in him; even his misery he could accept. Very laboriously he strove to come by an idea of himself, and was only the more confused when he arrived at this: