Gertrude evaded the first question.
"I once heard a very brilliant man say—what I did not then understand—that chivalry was always the prelude to imposition. I believe I don't care very especially for chivalry. Fair play is better, don't you think so?" She did not pause for a reply, but began taking off her long gloves.
"Which would you like best from papa, flattery or square-toed, honest truth?"
Her mother laughed.
"Gertrude, you are perfectly ridiculous. The institution of marriage, as now established, wouldn't hang together ten minutes if your square-toed, honest truth, as you call it, were to be tried between husbands and wives. Most wives are frightened nearly to death for fear they will become acquainted with the truth some day. They don't want it. They were not—built for it." Gertrude began to move about the room impatiently. Her mother smiled at her and went on: "Don't you look at it that way? No? Well, you are young yet. Wait until you've been married three years—"
The girl turned upon her with an indignant face. Then suddenly she threw her arms about her mother's neck.
"Poor mamma, poor mamma," she said. "Didn't you find out for three years after? How did you bear it? I should have committed suicide. I—"
"Oh, no you wouldn't!" said her mother, with a bitter little inflection. "They all talk that way. Girls all feel so, if they know enough to feel at all—to think at all. They rage and wear out their nerves—as you are doing now, heaven knows why—and the beloved husband calls a doctor and buys sweets and travels with the precious invalid, and never once suspects that he is at the bottom of the whole trouble. It never dawns upon him that what she is dying for is a real and loyal companionship, such as she had fondly dreamed of, and not at all for sea air. It doesn't enter his mind that she feels humiliated because she knows that a great part of his life is a sealed book to her, and that he wishes to keep it so."
She paused, and her daughter stroked her cheek. This was indeed a revelation to the girl. She had been wholly deceived by her mother's gay manner all these years. She was taking herself sharply to task now.
"But by and by when she succeeds in killing all her self-respect; when she makes up her mind that the case is hopeless, and that she must expect absolutely no frankness in life beyond the limits of conventional usage prescribed for purblind babies; after she arrives at the point where she discovers that her happiness is a pretty fiction built on air foundation—well, daughter, after that she—she strives to murder all that is in her beyond and above the petty simpleton she passes for—and she succeeds fairly well, doesn't she?"