Maradick felt a little uncomfortable. His acquaintance with Mrs. Lester had been a short one, and in a little time he was going back to have tea with Mr. Lester; he had seemed a harmless kind of man.
“I am very sorry——” he began.
“Oh, please,” she went on quickly, “don’t think that I’m unhappy. I don’t curse fate or do anything silly like that. I suppose there are very few persons who find marriage exactly what they expect it to be. I don’t complain. But oh! Mr. Maradick, never marry an author. Of course you can’t—how silly of me!—but I should like you to understand a little what I have felt about it all.”
He tried clumsily to find words.
“All of us,” he said, “must discover as we get on that things aren’t quite what we thought they would be. And of marriage especially. One’s just got to make up one’s mind to it. And then I think there’s a lot to be grateful for if there’s only one person, man or woman, to whom one matters; who, well, sticks to one and——”
“Oh! I know,” she sighed reminiscently.
“What I mean is that it doesn’t so much matter what that person is, stupid or ugly or anything, if they really care. There isn’t so much of that steady affection going about in the world that we can afford to disregard it when it comes. Dear me!” he added with a laugh, “how sentimental I am!”
“I know,” she said eagerly. “That’s just it; if Fred did care like that, oh dear, how wonderful it would be! But he doesn’t. I don’t really exist for him at all. He thinks so much about his books and the people in them that real people aren’t there. At first I thought that I could help him with his work, read to him and discuss it with him; and I know that there were a lot of grammatical mistakes, but he wouldn’t let me do anything. He shut me out. I was no use to him at all.”
She clenched her hands and frowned. As a matter of fact she got on with him very well, but they had quarrelled that morning, over nothing at all, of course. And then it made things more exciting if you thought that you hated your husband, and Mr. Maradick was a fine-looking man.
And he thought how young she was and what a dreary stretch of years was before her. He knew what his own married life had been: fifteen years of disillusion and misunderstanding and sullen silence.