BILLY CULTIVATES A ``COMFORTABLE INDIFFERENCE''
The next morning, under the uncompromising challenge of a bright sun, Billy began to be uneasily suspicious that she had been just a bit unreasonable and exacting the night before. To make matters worse she chanced to run across a newspaper criticism of a new book bearing the ominous title: ``When the Honeymoon Wanes A Talk to Young Wives.''
Such a title, of course, attracted her supersensitive attention at once; and, with a curiously faint feeling, she picked up the paper and began to read.
As the most of the criticism was taken up with quotations from the book, it was such sentences as these that met her startled eyes:
``Perhaps the first test comes when the young wife awakes to the realization that while her husband loves her very much, he can still make plans with his old friends which do not include herself. . . . Then is when the foolish wife lets her husband see how hurt she is that he can want to be with any one but herself. . . . Then is when the husband--used all his life to independence, perhaps--begins to chafe under these new bonds that hold him so fast. . . . No man likes to be held up at the end of a threatened scene and made to give an account of himself. . . . Before a woman has learned to cultivate a comfortable indifference to her husband's comings and goings, she is apt to be tyrannical and exacting.''
`` `Comfortable indifference,' indeed!'' stormed Billy to herself. ``As if I ever could be comfortably indifferent to anything Bertram did!''
She dropped the paper; but there were still other quotations from the book there, she knew;and in a moment she was back at the table reading them.
``No man, however fondly he loves his wife, likes to feel that she is everlastingly peering into the recesses of his mind, and weighing his every act to find out if he does or does not love her to-day as well as he did yesterday at this time. . . .
Then, when spontaneity is dead, she is the chief mourner at its funeral. . . . A few couples never leave the Garden of Eden. They grow old hand in hand. They are the ones who bear and forbear;who have learned to adjust themselves to the intimate relationship of living together. . . .
A certain amount of liberty, both of action and thought, must be allowed on each side. . . . The family shut in upon itself grows so narrow that all interest in the outside world is lost. . . . No two people are ever fitted to fill each other's lives entirely. They ought not to try to do it.
If they do try, the process is belittling to each, and the result, if it is successful, is nothing less than a tragedy; for it could not mean the highest ideals, nor the truest devotion. . . . Brushing up against other interests and other personalities is good for both husband and wife. Then to each other they bring the best of what they have found, and each to the other continues to be new and interesting. . . . The young wife, however, is apt to be jealous of everything that turns her husband's attention for one moment away from herself. She is jealous of his thoughts, his words, his friends, even his business. . . . But the wife who has learned to be the clinging vine when her husband wishes her to cling, and to be the sturdy oak when clinging vines would be tiresome, has solved a tremendous problem.''
At this point Billy dropped the paper. She flung it down, indeed, a bit angrily. There were still a few more words in the criticism, mostly the critic's own opinion of the book; but Billy did not care for this. She had read quite enough--boo much, in fact. All that sort of talk might be very well, even necessary, perhaps (she told herself), for ordinary husbands and wives! but for her and Bertram--Then vividly before her rose those initial quoted words:
``Perhaps the first test comes when the young wife awakes to the realization that while her husband loves her very much, he can still make plans with his old friends which do not include herself.''
Billy frowned, and put her finger to her lips.
Was that then, last night, a ``test''? Had she been ``tyrannical and exacting''? Was she ``everlastingly peering into the recesses'' of Bertram's mind and ``weighing his every act''?
Was Bertram already beginning to ``chafe''
under these new bonds that held him?
No, no, never that! She could not believe that.
But what if he should sometime begin to chafe?
