ed, 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 fell in love with her. He