“You’re not!” says she spitefully. They’re the first words she has spoken since she pleaded with you in agonized tones to “let her be.”
Then, as you sit down to the mockery of oysters and soup, anger rises in you. What creatures women are! Hasn’t a man a right to ask why dinner isn’t ready in his own house without the sky falling? You look at your watch; more than half an hour late. Well, why wasn’t it ready? Why? When a man comes home tired from the office, he has a right to expect his dinner to be ready. Yes, by Jove! and a right to ask “Why?” and a right, too, to expect a cheerful, pleasant wife! What struck Felicia, anyway? and in spite of your anger, pity sweeps over you for poor little Felicia crying upstairs, and you rise and go to the door, angry and distressed, while your inner self tells you pity is unmanly. You feel abused and bruised; how scenes take it out of one, you think resentfully, and just here you pause, for there are footsteps on the stairs. It can’t be Felicia, you think. But it is Felicia, who comes into the room, beautifully dressed. Why, she must have got up and dressed, tears and all, the instant you left the room! She comes in gallantly, carrying the powder on her nose with effrontery, denying her eyes, which still show the ravages of tears, by the gay smile on her lips; and as dinner progresses, excellent, and with Felicia all as natural and gay as possible, you wonder more than ever what the devil it was all about anyway. But at night, as you ponder it over again, you get a certain blurred vision of what it meant. You are too young in marriage to put it into words, but you have an intuition that marriage, after all, is a very new country for Felicia, full of a thousand details you know nothing about, whose A, B, C she must learn slowly and painfully—and all alone, there is no one to help her. You can’t. She’s got to grape her way about by herself in this unfamiliar land. All you can do is to be very, very considerate and very, very careful not to make her cry.
But hang it all, if she’s going to cry every time you ask if dinner is ready, how are you going to help making her? And all at once the vision of how careful you have got to be makes you feel bowed down with care. You will never, you are sure, speak another natural word in her presence. Who would have believed she would cry so easily? How awful to consider you made her! Then you hear Felicia give a little breath of a sigh, like a child which has sobbed itself to sleep.
“Felicia,” you say impulsively, “I was a brute.”
“I was a goose,” she protests, “an awful little goose,” and deep down in your heart you agree with her, though you declare again it was your fault, and you have an uneasy feeling that she is at one with you about your being a brute, and you fall asleep at last thinking that things never again can have the same glamour between you two, that somehow Felicia’s tears have cried away the bloom of marriage. But in the morning you wake up and wonder what it was you thought had happened, for nothing has—things haven’t changed. You merely resolve that you will try to understand, mere man that you are, the finer creature the Lord has trusted you with. But oh, why can’t women be reasonable?
This scene flitted through my mind as the silence fell between my two selves; the other one of me brooded over my inertia in the matter in hand. At last he broke the silence and my awful vision of Felicia in tears with:
“A man ought, you know, to look after his young wife. He shouldn’t let her make herself conspicuous with men, especially with a silly young ass. It isn’t being jealous,” he concluded virtuously.
“Oh, no, we’re not jealous,” I agreed eagerly.
“You must speak to her.”