s
day--indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can
well be otherwise--most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of
life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it.
That's the crux. It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal
knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble.
In a vast number of marriages-and your mother's was one--girls are not
and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they
do not know until after that act of union which makes the reality of
marriage. Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements
and strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's was
one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such attraction as
there was. There is nothing more tragic in a woman's life than such a
revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer. Coarse-grained and unthinking
people are apt to laugh at such a mistake, and say, 'What a fuss about
nothing!' Narrow and self-righteous people, only capable of judging the
lives of others by their own, are apt to condemn those who make this
tragic error, to condemn them for life to the dungeons they have made for
themselves. You know the expression: 'She has made her bed, she must lie
on it!' It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or
lady in the best sense of those words; and I can use no stronger
condemnation. I have not been what is called a moral man, but I wish to
use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly of ties
or contracts into which you enter. Heaven forbid! But with the
experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the
victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands to
help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
understanding to know what they are doing. But they haven't! Let them
go! They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them. I have
had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a position to
judge your mother, and you are very young, without experience of what
life is. To go on with the story. After three years of effort to subdue
her shrinking--I was going to say her loathing and it's not too strong a
word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing under such circumstances--three
years of what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother's,
Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fe