My baby was born within ten months of my marriage and most of that time I was wretchedly, depressingly ill. All my memories of my early married life are of Olivia, in the mornings still with frost, cowering away from the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of engulfing nausea to sit out the duty calls of the leading ladies of Higgleston in the cold, disordered house; of Tommy gulping unsuitable meals of underdone and overdone things, and washing the day's accumulation of dishes after business hours, patient and portentously cheerful, with Olivia in a wrapper, half hysterical with weakness--all the young wife's dreams gone awry! And Tommy too, he must have had visions of himself coming home to a well-kept house, of delicious little dinners and long hours in which he should appear in his proper character as the adored, achieving male. Not long ago I read a book of a man's life written by a man, in which he justified himself of unfaithfulness because his wife appeared before him habitually in curl papers--and there were days when I couldn't even do my hair! In the beginning we had taken, in respect to Tommy's position among those same live business men, a house rather too large for us, and we hadn't counted on the wages of a servant. Now with the necessity upon us of laying by money for the Great Expense, we felt less justified in it than ever. This pinch of necessity was of the quality of corrosion on what must have been meant for the consummate experience. I have to dwell on it here because in this practical confusion of my illness, was laid the foundation of our later failure to come together on any working basis. We hadn't, in fact, time to find it; no time to understand, none whatever in which to explore the use of passion and react into that superunion of which the bodily relation is the overt sign--young things we were, who had not fairly known each other as man and woman before we were compelled to trace in one another the lineaments of parents, all attention drawn away from the imperative business of framing a common ideal, to centre on the child. What this precipitance accomplished was, that, instead of being drawn insensibly to find in the exigencies of marriage the natural unfolding of that inward vitality, always much stronger in me than any exterior phase, I was by the shock of too early maternity driven apart from the usual, and I still believe the happier, destiny of women. With all this we were spared the bitterness of the unwelcoming thought. Little homely memories swim up beyond the pains and depressions to mark, like twigs and leafage on a freshet, the swelling of the new affection: Effie at Montecito, overruling all my mother's shocked suggestions as to her supposed obliviousness of my condition, sitting up nights to sew for me ... the dress I tried to make myself ... the bureau drawer from which I used to take the little things every night to look at them ... the smell of orris.