ll 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 fell in
love with her. He was the architect of