Elsie left school and went back to Denmark engaged to Herr von Brincken, the Chief Magistrate, but he had heart disease and she did not marry him. Instead she married Richard Lindtner, a wealthy Dane, and made her home with him in the Old Market Place at Copenhagen, where for twenty-two years she was, to outward appearances, a happy and contented wife.
“I allowed my senses to be inflamed while my mind remained cold and my heart contracted with disgust. I consciously profaned the sacred words of love by applying them to a man whom I chose for his money. Meanwhile, I developed into the frivolous society woman everybody took me to be. Every woman wears the mask which best suits her purpose. My mask was my smile....”
It is only in this book, the second instalment of Elsie Lindtner’s fragmentary diary and correspondence, that she gives us a reason for leaving her husband after twenty-two years of married life, the wish that he should have children. In “The Dangerous Age” she hints at other and various reasons. To her friend and cousin, Lili Rothe, the perfect wife and mother of “lanky daughters,” who could love another man passionately without ceasing to love her husband, she writes, when announcing her divorce, “There is no special reason ... none at least that is explicable to the world. As far as I know Richard has no entanglements, and I have no lover. There is no shadow of a scandal connected with our separation beyond that which must inevitably arise when two middle-aged partners throw down their cards in the middle of a rubber.... My real reason is so simple and clear that few will be content to accept it.... You know that Richard and I have got on as well as two people of opposite sex can do. There has never been an angry word between us. But one day the impulse—or whatever you like to call it—took possession of me that I must live alone—quite alone, and all to myself. Call it an absurd idea ... call it hysteria—which, perhaps, it is—I must get right away from everybody and everything. Joergen Malthe has planned and built a little villa for me in the belief that it was for some one else. The house is on an island, the name of which I will keep to myself for the present.”
In her self-communings, however, she never disguises the fact that escape from boredom was the main motive of her returning to the White Villa.
“Richard is still travelling, and entertains me scrupulously with accounts of the sights he sees and his lonely nights.... As in the past, he bores me with his interminable descriptions, and his whole middle-class outlook....”
Richard’s neatness and tidy ways bored her; his correctness in the convenances; even his way of eating, and “to watch him eat was a daily torture.”
“Sundays were no better in the Old Market Place. There I had Richard from morning till night. To be bored alone is bad; to be bored in the society of one other person is much worse. To think that Richard never noticed it! His incessant talk reminded me of a mill-wheel, and I felt as though all the flour were blowing into my eyes.”
In another place she says: “I am now sure that even if the difference in our own age did not exist, I could never marry Malthe.... I could do foolish, even mean things for the sake of the one man I loved with all my heart.... But set up a home with Joergen Malthe—never!”
The terrible part of home-life is that every piece of furniture in the house forms a link in the chain which binds two married people long after love has died out—if indeed it ever existed. Two human beings—who differ as much as two human beings always must do—are forced to adopt the same tastes, the same outlook. The home is built upon this incessant conflict.
“How often Richard and I gave way to each other with a consideration masking an annoyance that rankled more than a violent quarrel.... What a profound contempt I felt for his tastes and, without saying so, how he disapproved of mine. No, his home was not mine, although we lived in it like an ideal couple. My person for his money—that was the bargain crudely but truthfully expressed.”