oose
between continuing to live with me and resuming her perfect liberty,
can I persuade myself that she would remain my wife? She would not. Not
for a day, not for an hour. Of that I am morally convinced. And I
acknowledge the grounds of her dissatisfaction. We are unsuited to each
other. We do not understand each other. Our marriage is physical and
nothing more. My love--what is my love? I do not love her mind, her
intellectual part. If I did, this frightful jealousy from which I
suffer would be impossible. My ideal of the wife perfectly suited to me
is far liker that girl at the public-house bar than Monica. Monica's
independence of thought is a perpetual irritation to me. I don't know
what her thoughts really are, what her intellectual life signifies. And
yet I hold her to me with the sternest grasp. If she endeavoured to
release herself I should feel capable of killing her. Is not this a
strange, a brutal thing?'

Widdowson had never before reached this height of speculation. In the
moment, by the very fact, of admitting that Monica and he ought not to
be living together, he became more worthy of his wife's companionship
than ever hitherto.

Well, he would exercise greater forebearance. He would endeavour to win
her respect by respecting the freedom she claimed. His recent
suspicions of her were monstrous. If she knew them, how her soul would
revolt from him! What if she took an interest in other men, perchance
more her equals than he? Why, had he not just been thinking of another
woman, reflecting that she, or one like her, would have made him a more
suitable wife than Monica? Yet this could not reasonably be called
unfaithfulness.

They were bound together for life, and their wisdom lay in mutual
toleration, the constant endeavour to understand each other aright--not
in fierce restraint of each other's mental liberty. How many marriages
were anything more than mutual forbearance? Perhaps there ought not to
be such a thing as enforced permanence of marriage. This was daring
speculation; he could not have endured to hear it from Monica's lips.
But--perhaps, some day, marriage would be dissoluble at the will of
either party to it. Perhaps the man who sought to hold a woman when she
no longer loved him would be regarded with contempt and condemnation.

What a simple thing marriage had always seemed to him, and how far from
simple he had found it! Why, it led him to musings which overset the
order of the world, a