course, it's plain enough now--the revolt of starved nerves. I cared only
for my mind, grew only in that, and the rest of me withered up like a
stalk in dry soil. So the flower drooped too--in decadent epigram. But
nobody pointed out the truth of it all to me, and I scorned to give my
body a thought. People predicted a brilliant future--for me, crying
inside! Then I married. I married the girl who had taken the star part in
the play. According to the logic of the situation, it was inevitable.
Everybody remarked how inevitable it was. A decorative girl, you know. She
wanted to be the wife of a great man.... Well, we didn't get along. There
was an honest streak in me somewhere which hated deception. I couldn't
play the part of "brilliant" young poet with any success. She was at me
all the while to write more of the same thing. And I didn't want to. The
difference between the "great" man I was supposed to be and the sick child
I really was, began to torture. I knew I oughtn't to go on any further if
I wanted to do anything real. Then one night we had an "artistic" dinner.
My wife had gotten hold of a famous English poet, and through him a
publisher. The publisher was her real game. I drank champagne before
dinner so as to be "brilliant." I was. And before I realized it, Norah had
secured a promise from the publisher to bring out a book of plays. I
remember she said it was practically finished. But it wasn't, only the
one, and I hated that. But I sat down conscientiously to write the book
that she, and apparently all the world that counted, expected me to write.
Well, I couldn't write it. Not a blessed word! Something inside me refused
to work. And there I was. In a month or so she began to ask about it.
Norah thought I ought to turn them out while she waited. I walked up and
down the park one afternoon wondering what to tell her.... And when I
realized that either she would never understand or would despise me, I
grew desperate. I wrote her a note, full of fine phrases about
"incompatibility," her "unapproachable ideals," the "soul's need of
freedom"--things she _would_ understand and wear a heroic attitude