He now perceived clearly that she hampered him, that he could have got on very much better without her.
"You are not interested in my work," he cried, blaming her; "a woman is always like that. No detachment with them is possible. I ought to have understood this."
Then Annie broke down, and contrition overcame him. He took her in his arms where she cuddled like a little kitten.
"I'm no one for you," he whispered, while a fierce sigh rent him.
But convinced that he suffered by the arrangement more than she did, he cherished a grudge against her because she interfered with him. Fearing to disquiet his mother, he allowed several months to pass before he wrote to her of his marriage. Viewing it coldly, he felt much cause for shame in the situation.
Quarrels were constant, and as the sight of Annie disquieted him, he shut himself off from her more and more. He worked, slept and ate in his shop, and Annie inhabited her lonely little room, weeping and staring out over the house-tops in acute disgust. As Emil had said, devotion to an abstract ideal was impossible to her and she was jealous now of his work as of a rival, so that they had no topic about which they could talk when together. Everything furnished a subject for dispute, even Ding Dong and his pet. Ding Dong disgusted her by his outlandish appearance, and the monkey, she declared, made her nervous.
The day following her meeting with Rachel, Annie spoke of the encounter.
"I met someone you know yesterday," she said; "a girl from Maine."
Wrinkling up his brow, Emil paused in his work.
Something in his expression excited and angered his wife.