Gradually, the obsession which had clouded his vision began to lift from his eyes. He saw her as she was, this woman to whom he had chosen to fasten the chains of his existence. He was proud of her, of her charm, of the magnetism she exerted over other men, of the admiration she evoked in the brilliant formal society into which she had led him, but he perceived at last that she neither understood what he was working for nor was able to assist him in the least. He found himself divided against himself, as it were, leading two opposite lives.
He began to ask himself questions. He said to himself that he was famous and envied, that everything he did succeeded, and that yet he was not happy. He sought in himself some explanation. He recalled two sayings, one that of his uncle who, at the end of a life heaped with honors, could say: “I die a disappointed man,” and the remark of his old professor: “In art, the critical age is forty, up to then one can promise, after then one must achieve.” He began to feel this crisis in his life, to ask himself whether he had in him the strength to revolt or whether he would renounce the ambitious flights of his old ideals in the easy satisfaction of what the public called success. For he perceived clearly that the fault lay in him, that he no longer lived in his art, that he served two gods, and that in this divided allegiance lay the death of all his struggling toward true greatness. He sought to make his wife understand and found a blank incomprehension. Then he tried to order his life on new lines, to divide the year into two parts, and to regain in solitary summers on unfrequented islands something of the old enthusiastic concentration.
But he found that the habits of home, of pleasant friends, of the woman who held him by mysterious impulses, were too strong, and he came to the day when he understood his uncle, and said to himself:
“It is ended. I shall not do what I want to do. It is beyond me, as my life has been cast.”
A profound melancholy came over him and, in his secret heart, undivined by his closest friends the cancer of disillusionment began to grow. His eccentricities increased. He had scenes with his wife in which he burst into violent tirades or scornful laughter which she could not understand. Though he never accused her, he repeated often bitterly to himself that his career was a sacrifice to the woman, who neither appreciated nor perceived the sacrifice.
During these years, he had never, for an instant, entertained the slightest suspicion of his wife. He gave her absolute faith. His theory of marriage was not as a reciprocal tyranny but as a free union. He did not claim any right over her actions or attempt to limit her interests in other men. In the beginning he had explained himself at length.
“If the day ever comes when you find that you love another man, come to me and tell me,” he said. “I shall not stand in your way, no matter how I may feel. Marriage exists only so long as it is voluntary on both sides. All I demand is that there should be no deceit, that each should remember the dignity of the other.”
“If you say that you don’t love me!” she said, laughing, but a little anxious.
“You are wrong; I love you in my own way.”
She was silent quite a while, watching him.