There is always a pathetic reaction, a curious sense of loss in the midst of possession, which follows on the attainment of every great desire. If anyone had told him that he was not perfectly happy, he would have indignantly denied the accuracy of their assertion. Whenever any misgiving that he was not so arose in his own mind, he repulsed it with contempt as the mere ungrateful rebelliousness of human nature. Yet now and then a vague sense that his life was not much more perfect than it had been before the desires of his heart had been given to him, occasionally came over him, though he always thrust it away.
She herself felt sometimes an almost irresistible inclination to say to him; 'And you, you who set your soul on marriage with me, have you found the lasting joys that you expected, or have you learned that the fulfilment of a dream is never quite the dream itself—has always some glory wanting?'
But she refrained. Women are always so unwise when they ask those questions, she reflected; so like children who pull up the plants in their garden to see what growth or what roots they have.
'We are just like anybody else, after all!' she did say once, with a mingling of despondency and of humour. 'I suppose we cannot escape from the age we live in, which is neither original nor imaginative, nor anything that I know of, except feverish and unhappy. Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, certainly, is gone to live in Syria, and we might do the same, but would it be any better? Do you think life is any larger there? I should be afraid there are only more mosquitoes.'
'I imagine we should only find in Syria what we took there, as Madame de Swetchine said of Rome,' replied Othmar, with some discontent. 'Life is an incomplete thing; unsatisfactory because its passions are finite, its years few, and its time of slow development and of slow decline wholly disproportionate, as you said just now, to its short moment of attainment and maturity; and also because habit, routine, prejudice, human stupidity, have all contrived to weight it with unnecessary burdens, to bind it with needless and intolerable laws, to take all the glow and spontaneity and rebound out of it. Conventionality is its curse.'
'And marriage!' said his wife. 'Oh, my dear, I do not mean to be unpleasant, but you know it is indisputably true that I should have been much fonder of you, and you of me, if we had never married each other. There is something stifling in marriage; it confounds love with property. I often wonder how the human race ever contrived to make such a mistake popular or universal.'
'It is not I who say that,' said Othmar with a touch of embarrassment.
'Oh no; but you think it. Every man thinks it,' she replied tranquilly. 'I often wonder,' she continued more dreamily, 'how it will be when you love some other woman. You will some day—of course you will. I wonder what will happen——'
'How can you do such injustice to me and to yourself? I shall never care for any other living thing.'
She looked at him through the shadow of her drooped lids.