l.
As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded
a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We were
furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, callously
selfish, generously self-sacrificing.

I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn't hang
together one with another, that contradicted one another, that were,
nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and sincere. I see
them now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend the
crumpled confusions of our complex moral landslide. Some I found
irritating beyond measure. I answered her--sometimes quite abominably.

"Of course," she would say again and again, "my life has been a
failure."

"I've besieged you for three years," I would retort "asking it not to
be. You've done as you pleased. If I've turned away at last--"

Or again she would revive all the stresses before our marriage.

"How you must hate me! I made you wait. Well now--I suppose you have
your revenge."

"REVENGE!" I echoed.

Then she would try over the aspects of our new separated lives.

"I ought to earn my own living," she would insist.

"I want to be quite independent. I've always hated London. Perhaps I
shall try a poultry farm and bees. You won't mind at first my being a
burden. Afterwards--"

"We've settled all that," I said.

"I suppose you will hate me anyhow..."

There were times when she seemed to regard our separation with
absolute complacency, when she would plan all sorts of freedoms and
characteristic interests.

"I shall go out a lot with Smithie," she said.

And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for that I
cannot even now quite forgive her.

"Your aunt will rejoice at all this. She never cared for me..."

Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie,
full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the presence of the horrid
villain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds. She
had long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic close
clingings. There were moments when only absolute speechlessness
prevented her giving me a stupendous "talking-to"--I could see it in
her eye. The wrong things she would have said! And I recall, too,
Mrs. Ramboat's slow awakening to something in, the air, the growing
expression of solicitude in her eye, only her well-trained fear of
Marion keeping her from speech.

And at last through all