“No! All I want is to have you love me and the children—be content with us.”
“You’re quite absurd, Cecily. I love the children as much as any man could. If it’s hard to love you it’s because you scare me off by frowning upon every harmless diversion—by wanting to shut us up together. That isn’t the way people live nowadays. Marriage isn’t prison. The trouble with us is that we aren’t congenial in our pursuits. You like one kind of thing. I like another. And you won’t admit my kind of thing at all.”
“I don’t want marriage to be prison, but if marriage is anything surely it’s the concentration of two people on making a home and bringing up their children.” She couldn’t add love.
“It’s a lot more than that nowadays, Cecily. I suppose that used to be all that was expected of a woman—having her children and keeping her house clean. Now things have broadened. Men need more, ask more; so do most women.”
“I suppose,” said Cecily, coldly, “what you mean is that men want a lot of noise and dissipation and promiscuous flirtations, and that they expect their wives to tolerate and join them in such things.”
The scorn in her voice drove Dick on. “Well, perhaps the woman who is willing to do that gets away with marriage better than the woman who clings to an outworn domesticity. I know your scorn of Della—and of girls like Della and Fliss. We aren’t any happier than Fliss and Matthew, or Della and Walter.”
Cecily became purely instinctive. She burst into tears and tried to talk through them.
“Then the fact that I have three children and they have none doesn’t make any difference to you?”
“The children are beside the point. I’m glad we have them; so are you. But you can’t justify everything, excuse all unhappiness, swallow yourself up, even in children. For God’s sake be reasonable, Cecily. Stick to the point at issue.”
But she couldn’t. She lost her case, sadly undeveloped as it was, by her rapidly mounting hysteria. It ended by her being put to bed, being soothed by Dick, assured of things which he didn’t mean in his heart and which she knew he didn’t mean—by the sleep of exhaustion and day of shamed apology which followed for both of them.