e age, and I am a woman, no longer young. Gone
now are the spring floods that once swept us together. Gone now is the
flame of adoration that burned clean our altar of daily intercourse
and left us blind to the weaknesses we were too happy to remember. For
there was a time when we loved each other. I know that as well as
Duncan does. But it died away, that ghostly flame. It went out like a
neglected fire. And blowing on dead ashes can never revive the
old-time glow.

"So they were married and lived happy ever afterward!" That is the
familiar ending to the fairy-tales I read over and over again to my
Dinkie and Poppsy. But they are fairy-tales. For who lives happy ever
afterward? First love chloroforms us, for a time, and we try to hug to
our bosoms the illusion that Heaven itself is only a sort of endless
honeymoon presided over by Lohengrin marches. But the anesthetic wears
away and we find that life isn't a bed of roses but a rough field that
rewards us as we till it, with here and there the cornflower of
happiness laughing unexpectedly up at us out of our sober acres of
sober wheat. And often enough we don't know happiness when we see it.
We assuredly find it least where we look for it most. I can't even
understand why we're equipped with such a hunger for it. But I find
myself trending more and more to that cynic philosophy which defines
happiness as the absence of pain. The absence of pain--that is a lot
to ask for, in this life!

I wonder if Dinky-Dunk is right in his implication that I am getting
hard? There are times, I know, when I grate on him, when he would
probably give anything to get away from me. Yet here we are, linked
together like two convicts. And I don't believe I'm as hard as my
husband accuses me of being. However macadamized they may have made
life for me, there's at least one soft spot in my heart, one garden
under the walls of granite. And that's the spot which my two children
fill, which my children keep green, which my children keep holy. It's
them I think of, when I think of the future--when I should at least be
thinking a little of my grammar and remembering that the verb "to be"
takes the nominative, just as discontented husbands seem to take the
initiative! That's why I can't quite find the courage to ask for
freedom. I have seen enough of life to know what the smash-up of a
family means to its toddlers. And I want my children to have a chance.
They can't have that chance without at leas