ortions that are sometimes
almost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things
and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential
temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear. Some readers
will understand--to others I shall seem no more than an unfeeling brute
who couldn't make allowances.... It's easy to make allowances now; but
to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one's married life
open before one, the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden of
roses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful
silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk; a
compromise, the least effectual thing in all one's life.

Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every
poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful succession
of grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one of
aesthetic sensibility.

I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that
time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It's the pettiest thing
to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It was
her idea, too, to "wear out" her old clothes and her failures at home
when "no one was likely to see her"--"no one" being myself. She allowed
me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories....

All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed about
furniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court Road, and she
chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,--sweeping
aside my suggestions with--"Oh, YOU want such queer things." She pursued
some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal--that excluded all
other possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our
sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had
lamps on long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in grog-tubs.
Smithie approved it all. There wasn't a place where one could sit and
read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in the dining-room
recess. And we had a piano though Marion's playing was at an elementary
level.

You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my
restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had
insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change;
she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her
peculiar class. She preserve