In this Eighth Year she is in a state bordering on hysteria, when anything may happen to her. Even her husband is beginning to get alarmed. He is at last awakened out of his self-complacency. He is beginning to watch her, with a vague uneasiness. Why does she look so queerly at him sometimes as though she hated him? Why does she say such bitter, cruel, satirical things, which stab him and leave a poison in the wound? Why does she get into such passionate rages about trivial things, and then reveal a passionate remorse? Why does she sink into long silences, sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at the pattern on the carpet, as though it had put a spell upon her? He cannot understand. She says there is nothing wrong with her health, she refuses to see a doctor. She scoffs at the idea of going away for a little holiday to the seaside. She says it would bore her to death. Once she bursts into tears and weeps on his shoulder. But she cannot, or will not, explain the cause of her tears, so that he becomes impatient with her and talks to her roughly, though he is sorry afterwards. He begins to see now that marriage is a difficult game. Perhaps they were not suited to each other. They married too young, before they had understood each other.... However they have got to make the best of it now. That is the law of life--to make the best of it. So in the Eighth Year the husband tries to take a common-sense view of things, not knowing that in the Eighth Year it is too late for common sense as far as the wife is concerned. She wants uncommon sense. Only some tremendous and extraordinary influence, spiritual, or moral, or intellectual, beyond the limits of ordinary common sense, may save her from the perils in her own heart. She must find a way of escape, for these unsatisfied yearnings, for this beating heart, for this throbbing brain. Her little home has become a cage to her. Her husband has become her jailer. Her life has become too narrow, too petty, too futile. In the Eighth Year she must find a way of escape--anyhow, anywhere. And in the Eighth Year the one great question is in what direction will she go? There are many ways of escape. CHAPTER VII