“That, too, you must throw off,” said the philosophic Butterfly. “There are few wives who haven’t had some of that kind of experience. For the most part men are abominable wretches, their whole lives made up of deceit and lies. It hurt me cruelly, cruelly when I found it out and just had to believe it in the face of not wanting to; but now, well—I have taught myself not to care very much.”
“It seems to me that a wife only ceases to care when she ceases to love, and then she ought to give her husband up entirely,” said Mrs. Doring.
“Yes, it is true; when one doesn’t care it is because one doesn’t love one’s husband any more. Of course, it would be honester, more moral and self-respecting to leave him, but we women are mostly tied up by different kinds of chains, so that no matter how wide our eyes are opened we usually go right on pretending we don’t see, and so become hypocrites, too. The whole fabric seems to be pretty much a warp and woof of lies. But I don’t puzzle much over problems as big and hard as that. I haven’t the head for it. I just edge along the easiest way I can, and leave the things I don’t understand, and couldn’t set right if I did, for others to puzzle over and fix up if they can.”
Cartice was astonished at the Butterfly’s hard trials and airy method of ignoring them. We are always astonished to learn that another has had the same kind of a load to carry that we have borne, all the more if that other has carried it gaily. It is common to believe our own experiences unique.
“You are ever so much cleverer than I when it comes to things learned out of books,” Mrs. Layton went on, “I have very little of what they call learning—too little entirely; but any one can see that you are well instructed. But when it comes to knowing about people as they are and not as they ought to be, I am far ahead of you, though I am only a month or two older. You are a mere baby in all that, absolutely blind to what I can see across the street; and you are such an earnest, honest, credulous soul that you are bound to have your heart broken dozens of times while you are learning what you ought to know already.”
“How did you learn it all so soon?”
“By experience, the only school whose lessons we remember. I was married at seventeen and am twenty-four now. One can learn a heap of things in seven years, with so good a chance as I have had.” (Here the Butterfly’s mouth took on a hard and bitter curve, which told more than her word of what her sad wisdom had cost.) “That I was romantic goes without saying. I believed in the foolish love-stories I read and expected life to be like them. Were I clever like you, I would write books and tell about life as it is and not as novel writers generally pretend it is, deluding the ignorant and inexperienced. I actually believed there was such a thing as happiness, and that I could secure it in the usual way, by marrying the man I was in love with—otherwise the man who had succeeded in casting a spell over me that caused me to see him through a mist of enchantment, for that is what it means. But my fool’s paradise didn’t last long. I soon learned to my sorrow that a man out of a book is not at all like a man in a book. One shock after another came, until at last nothing could surprise me. After a time my husband began to drink heavily and does yet, and that is what has brought us to poverty. When he is bad drunk he is ugly and dangerous. In short, my life is hard and hateful ’way down out of sight.”
“O my friend,” cried Cartice, with glistening eyes, “it is a tragedy, and I thought nobody suffered as I do.”
Mrs. Layton continued: “When I married I loved him, was proud of him, believed in him. Now I only pity him, and care for him only as a mother cares for a child. Could he read my thoughts his vanity, should he have any left, must suffer. Such men lose far more than we do, after all, but they are so steeped in selfishness, so besotted in ignorance, they can’t see it. And he has wretched health, as any one may see. I don’t know what the end will be, and dare not think of it.”
“I wish we could know what such experiences mean,” said Cartice. “What is suffering for? Why must it be? We try hard to find the right road; we do the best we can; the way looks fair and smooth, and then from no fault of our own that we can see we are plunged into dark depths. I wish we knew the reason of it, the purpose of it. I wish we knew.”