from the hall
gas, and I met his look. 'They might be worse, I suppose, but for
goodness' sake take them off!' he said; 'you don't have to wear them,
you know!' I said nothing, but broke away and went down the steps. He
came after me and continued to look in the street. 'I say, you look just
like your mother in them!' he went on. That was the cruellest thing he
could have said, because he knew my mother ... he only did it because he
did not think I really had to wear them, and he thought it would make me
leave off. I told him what the oculist had said, and he said he would
call on me again after I was forty. I pretended to laugh, but I was
feeling like death. Later on I slipped them off, and he had the tact not
to say anything when he saw what I had done. I never wore them again
with him, and went over the world unable to see the things he was raving
about, and having perpetually to pretend that I did and guess at the
right thing to say. Now--it doesn't matter. I prefer wearing them to
having blinding headaches."

"It was pretty rotten of him to let it make a difference," said
Ishmael.

"No, I understand what he felt so well. I knew it myself. There is
always something ridiculous about making love to a woman in glasses. It
destroys atmosphere. If you're married, and either you're so one with
the man that he really does love you through everything or else is so
dull that he doesn't feel their ugliness, it wouldn't make a difference.
But I was not married--he had not the married temperament. And you must
admit that it is impossible to imagine a mistress in glasses...."

"Don't!" said Ishmael sharply.

"Don't what? Did you think I was speaking bitterly? I wasn't. There
isn't a scrap of bitterness in me, I'm thankful to say. I couldn't have
lived if there had been. I saw that almost at the beginning, as I did
about jealousy. If you have much to be bitter and jealous about, you
can't be; it would kill you. It's only the people who can indulge in a
little of it who dare to. I have not been unhappy for the most part, and
I wouldn't undo it, which is the great thing. You knew I had given up
having times away with him years ago?"

"Yes, I wondered why."

"The thing had somehow lost something ... what is lost in marriage just
the same--rapture, glow, fragrance.... And in marriage, with luck,
something else comes to take its place ... domesticity, which is very
sweet to a woman. Looking after him instead of being looked aft