Marriage -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction; Portrait painters -- Fiction; Women novelists -- Fiction
Ours is an age of conflict, of rapid change, taking place in our
knowledge and all about us. The conflict is psychological as well as
material. Take one small detail of our machinery. In Jane's own lifetime
had come a total revolution in man's method of transportation. Subways,
elevated trains, automobiles, aeroplanes. How swiftly must the
individual readjust himself. He has within him, intensified, the
struggle and the discoördination which is taking place in the large
social group. He has to meet the crisis of accepting daily new truths,
while he is bound, even tortured, by traditional convictions.
It was because the Jerry type of man did not see that this
discoördination ramified into every corner of our lives--that it is
religious, social, political, as well as material and domestic. But
boy-man that he was, he recognized it only where it struck home quickest
to him, in his sex life, in his marital relations. He could not realize
that this was not the basis of the whole unrest and therefore to be laid
at woman's door--that it was only reaction from an universal
discoördination.
She had tried to work this out in her book; she had striven with all her
power to get above this seething, boiling, electrified whirlpool that
we call life, to find purpose in it--direction and ultimate calm. She
wanted to drive home her conviction that, whether we swim with the
torrent or against it, we must do it together--men and women--adjusting
and readjusting.
Dawn came. She heard Anna stirring below, before she dropped asleep.
Jerry was still asleep when she left the house. She was relieved that
she did not have to meet him, in the disorganized condition of mind and
body in which she found herself after her sleepless and perturbed night.
She took a brisk walk before she went to her work, and compromised by
setting herself to revision rather than creation.
When she came into the nursery on her return, she found Jerry there. At
sight of her he put the baby down quickly on the bed, and came toward
her, with a look on his face she could not fathom.
"Jane, why, Jane...." he began and stopped. He held out his hand and she
laid hers in it, while he still stared at her in the most intense way.
"I can hardly believe it--I couldn't lay it down."
"I'm so glad. I came and peeped at you at three o'clock and I was so
excited that I couldn't sleep any more after that. I wanted so to know
what you thought about it."
"I almost came in to wake you up, but I thought I'd just take the rest
of the night to think it over."
"You--liked it?"
"No. I think you've done it wonderfully. I couldn't believe that you
could do it," he broke off. "I suppose the whole truth is that I don't
know you at all, any more than if we met last night."
"Oh, you know some of me, Jerry. You couldn't know what I kept secret."
"How did you learn all that, in that book?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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