When Olive had finished, Matheson asked her quietly: "Why did you marry me?"
"Why did you marry me?" she retorted.
"Because I honestly believed at the time that I loved you."
"I suppose you found out afterwards that you'd made a mistake, and then blamed it on to me?"
"I'm not blaming you—I'm trying to get the right perspective on to our marriage. I'm wondering if the woman I loved was yourself, or merely my idealization of you."
"I can't help it if I'm not the incarnation of all the virtues you imagined me to be!" Olive sat down and played nervously with a penholder, jabbing meaningless lines and dots on to a loose sheet of paper.
"When I married you, I thought you were in sympathy with me over the big things of life—the things that matter. But you turned them aside with a laugh. That put a barrier between us."
"I never could stand prigs. I thought I was marrying a man of the world."
"We seemed to be radically opposed in ideas. We drifted farther and farther away from one another. At the end of five years, our marriage was empty even of tepid affection. If there had been children, perhaps...."
"No doubt you'd have wanted to wheel them out in the perambulator!"