This sensitiveness arose from two main factors.  First, an egoism fostered by the worship of her friends and the leadership of her group,—­an egoism which led her to regard as a sort of insult anything disagreeable.  Accustomed to praise, the least criticism implied or outspoken cut like a knife; accustomed to being waited upon, she resented physical discomfort of the slightest kind.  Second, there must also have been an actual physical sensitiveness to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. that made her perceive what others failed to notice.  This led to an artistry manifested by her nice work in music and decoration and also by an excessive displeasure at the inartistic.

With this training, experience, and natural temperament she should have married a rich collector of art products, who would have added her to his collection and cherished her as his most fragile possession.  Instead, through the working of that strange law of contraries by which Nature strikes averages between extremes, she fell in love with a hulk of a man whose ideas on art were limited to calling a picture “pretty”, who loved sports and the pleasures of the table, and whose business motto was “Beat the other guy to it.”  A successful man, troubled with few subtleties either of approach or conscience, he viewed the marriage relationship in the old-fashioned way and the new American indulgence.  A man’s wife was to be given all the clothes she wanted, servants to help run the home, ought to bear two or three children, and love her indulgent husband.  As for any real intimacy, he knew nothing of it.  Kindly, self-indulgent, wife-indulgent, child-indulgent, ruthless in business, he may stand as something America has produced without any effort.

From the very first night J.’s world was shattered.  We need not enter into details in this matter, but a woman of this type needs finesse in the initiation into marriage more than at any other time.  Cave-man style outraged her every fiber, and the man was dumbfounded at her reaction.  Though he tried to make amends his very effort and lack of understanding complicated matters.

Aside from this matter, which in the course of time became adjusted, so that though she rebelled desire arose in her, she found herself at odds with her husband’s tastes and conduct in little things.  Though his table manners were good enough, the gusto of his eating annoyed her and took away her own appetite.  When they went to a play together the coarse jokes and the plainly sensuous aroused his enthusiasm.  He lacked subtlety and could not understand the “finer” things of life.  As he grew settled in matrimony, which he enjoyed in spite of her nerves (which he took for granted as like a woman), he grew stouter and this irritated and jarred her.