“You’ll have an income. They call it alimony. From a third to a half of my present income—more if you like—I don’t mind—three hundred a year, say. You’ve got your old people to keep and you’ll need all that.”
“And then—then you’ll be free?”
“Both of us.”
“And all this life you’ve hated”
I looked up at her wrung and bitter face. “I haven’t hated it,” I lied, my voice near breaking with the pain of it all. “Have you?”
IX
The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We were furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, callously selfish, generously self-sacrificing.
I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn’t hang together one with another, that contradicted one another, that were, nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and sincere. I see them now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend the crumpled confusions of our complex moral landslide. Some I found irritating beyond measure. I answered her—sometimes quite abominably.
“Of course,” she would say again and again, “my life has been a failure.”
“I’ve besieged you for three years,” I would retort “asking it not to be. You’ve done as you pleased. If I’ve turned away at last—”