Marriage -- Fiction; Runaway husbands -- Fiction; Social settlements -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
Julia knew by this time that marriage was not all happiness, all
irresponsible joy. She had often wondered why the women she knew did not
settle themselves seriously to a study of its phases, when the cloudless
days inevitably gave place to something incomprehensible and disturbing.
Even lovers like Kennedy and her husband had their times of being wholly
out of sympathy with each other, she knew, and she and Jim were not
angels; they must only try to be patient and forbearing until the dark
hour went by.
With a sense of unbearable weight at her heart she resigned herself to
the hard task of endurance. Sometimes with a bitter rush would come the
memory of how they had loved each other, and then Julia surrendered
herself to long paroxysms of tears; it was so hard, so bewildering, to
have Jim cold and quiet, to live in this painful alternation of hope and
fear. But she never let Jim see her tears, and told herself bravely that
life held some secret agony for every one, and that she must bear her
share of the world's burden. How had it all come about, she wondered.
Her thoughts went back to the honeymoon, and she had an aching memory of
Central Park in its fresh green, of Jim laughing at her when she tried
to be very matronly, in her kimono, over their breakfast tray. Oh, the
exquisite happy days, the cloudless, wonderful time!
She left the thought of it for the winter that followed. That had been
happy, too. Not like the New York months, not without its grave
misgivings, not without its hours of bitter pain, yet happy on the
whole. Then Honolulu, all so bright a memory until that hour on the
ship--that first horrible premonition of so much misery that was to
follow. The San Mateo summer had somehow widened the wordless,
mysterious gap between them, and the winter! Julia shuddered as she
thought of the winter. Where was her soul while her body danced and
dressed and dined and slept through those hot hours? Where was any one's
soul in that desperate whirl of amusement?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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