“Then it’s true, Cornelia?”
“What is true?”
“That you and Oliver have separated.”
“Oh—that? That is a minor matter.”
“Minor? How minor?” I exclaimed in some bewilderment.
“Why, compared with other experiences. I wasn’t thinking about Oliver just now. It’s a horrid thing to say; but I’m not interested in Oliver just now. We’ve always been separated—in a sense. And just now, I feel as if he didn’t belong to me, nor I to him; as if he were someone that I had known once, and didn’t know any more.”
“How did it happen, Cornelia?—I don’t mean what the children told me. But the rest of it—if you—if you want me to know.”
“Yes,” she said, “I do want you to know, because—well, I want you to understand. You know that I was not in love with Oliver when I married him. I liked him very much. I do now, in a way. But I married him because he offered me the life that I wanted, then, and that my father and mother thought suitable. And I gave him, at least for a long time, what he wanted—mainly—of a wife: a woman who would look well in public with him, and entertain his friends, and be the mother of his children. When the children were little, we were closer together, for a few years, than we have ever been since. Still, as time went on, of course we accumulated ‘things in common’—actual things and experiences and acquaintances; and as many of them—nearly all of them—were nice things and pleasant acquaintances and agreeable experiences, I was not dissatisfied; and I began to believe there wasn’t much more to be had from life than just the kind of satisfaction I had found. I believed, or pretended to believe, what you were saying last summer: that the ‘inner life’ is of small consequence, and that everything that is precious can be—what did you call it?—‘externalized,’ ‘objectified.’ Do you really believe it yourself?”
“I try to keep in mind,” I explained, “all that can be said for that theory. It is a kind of compromise, a second-best sort of theory, which many of us have to accept, when we are starving, or when a death takes place in the inner chamber of our lives. That’s what our wits are for, isn’t it—to help us put up gracefully with what we have to put up with—grace or no grace?”
“But the theory is worthless,” cried Cornelia; “it’s absolutely worthless, when one is in trouble, in serious trouble! I suppose I have had less of it than anyone I know. As I look over my life before this year, it seems like a dream, it has been so easy and so fortunate. But when trouble does come,—illness, death, and that sort of thing,—one has to have inner resources. Oliver has no inner resources. Oliver hates trouble, and illness, and pain; and, whenever he can, he runs away from them. When he is sick himself, he acts like an untrained child. He is terrified and certain that he is going to die; he is really dreadfully afraid of death—his own death, or the death of anyone he is fond of.”