forgotten. We talked a little language together whence were "friends,"
and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and we kept up such an outward
show that till the very end Smithie thought our household the most
amiable in the world.

I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life
of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That life of intimate
emotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs from an
ugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimes
almost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things
and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential
temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear. Some readers
will understand--to others I shall seem no more than an unfeeling brute
who couldn't make allowances.... It's easy to make allowances now; but
to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one's married life
open before one, the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden of
roses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful
silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk; a
compromise, the least effectual thing in all one's life.

Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every
poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful succession
of grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one of
aesthetic sensibility.

I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that
time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It's the pettiest thing
to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It was
her idea, too, to "wear out" her old clothes and her failures at home
when "no one was likely to see her"--"no one" being myself. She allowed