“And no man will ever break your heart,” she said in fond delusion.
Thurley vanished. During the entire opera she had thought of the fact that Bliss Hobart really worried because she had not worn stouter boots ... it was so “comfy” to know some one worried about such things. If only the men who thought ahead about all the little things for a woman were not so universally inclined to forbid a woman’s thinking ahead about the big ones....
CHAPTER XXIII
When spring convinced Birge’s Corners it had come to stay and housewives mended screens and painted porch steps, and indulged in that blight on civilization, house-cleaning, there came a better, finer understanding between Dan and Lorraine.
Since their New York wedding journey with Thurley Precore’s début the really great event, there had been a constrained sort of relationship. When two persons admit to themselves they are not happy and it was a mistake to have married, yet are making the best of it and trying to trick the world into thinking them the personification of bliss, the relationship is more hopeless than if each jogs on his own way admitting his discontent and lack of satisfaction. The latter course contains a ray of hope in the fact that systematic deceit and repression have not yet obtained a clutch.
But Dan and Lorraine had returned to the wonderful new house and, in a pathetic, truthful talk, realized that all life stretched before them in unending monotony unless they wished that much dreaded and unusual of happenings in Birge’s Corners—especially for a minister’s daughter—a divorce!
“Perhaps I did wrong to marry you,” Dan said, the first day of their return. “The Birge temper in a new fashion. I wanted to hurt some one else because I was hurt ... a pretty cheap way to do, wasn’t it?”
They were in the living-room where wedding presents were in huddled groups, for Lorraine brooked no interference such as a “settler” to which many brides are subjected. Everything was shiny new, unbecomingly so; the rugs were scarcely adjusted to the slippery floors, there was an air of dampness because the initial furnace fire was scarcely under headway, price marks were still pasted on the electric fixtures, there was something yet to be done with the landing baseboard as there always is something to be done after one has moved into the supposedly most complete house in the world.