ly.

"You're not cross?" she asked.

"Cross! Why?"

"At having it all proper."

"My dear Marion!" said I, and by way of answer took and kissed her
white-gloved, leather-scented hand....

I don't remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it was of
undistinguished time--for we were both confused and a little fatigued
and Marion had a slight headache and did not want caresses. I fell into
a reverie about my aunt, and realised as if it were a new discovery,
that I cared for her very greatly. I was acutely sorry I had not told
her earlier of my marriage.

But you will not want to hear the history of my honeymoon. I have told
all that was needed to serve my present purpose. Thus and thus it was
the Will in things had its way with me. Driven by forces I did not
understand, diverted altogether from the science, the curiosities and
work to which I had once given myself, I fought my way through a tangle
of traditions, customs, obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself,
limited myself, gave myself to occupations I saw with the clearest
vision were dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end of
purblind Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far
short of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms.

V

Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people,
the weakening of first this bond and then that of that complex contact?
Least of all can one of the two participants. Even now, with an
interval of fifteen years to clear it up for me, I still find a mass of
impressions of Marion as confused, as discordant, as unsystematic and
self-contradictory as life. I think of this thing and love her, of that
and hate her--of a hundred aspects in which I can now see her with an
unimpassioned sympathy. As I sit here trying to render some vision of
this infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierce
estrangement, moments of clouded intimacy, the passage of transition all
forgotten. We talked a little language together whence were "friends,"
and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and we kept up such an outward
show that till the very end Smithie thought our household the most
amiable in the world.

I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life
of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That life of intimate
emotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs from an
ugly one by a difference of surfaces and prop