cenes 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