She finally realized she no longer loved him.  It is doubtful if she realized this before the birth of her first and only child.  She lacked maternal feeling and rebelled with a bitter rebellion against the distortion of her figure that came with the pregnancy.  The nursing ordered by the doctor and expected by all around her nearly drove her “wild”, she said, for she felt like a “cow”, a “female.”  Indeed she reacted bitterly against the femaleness that marriage forced on her and hated the essential maleness of her husband.  Her emotional reaction against nursing took away her milk, and finally the disgusted family doctor ordered the baby weaned and he was turned over to a servant.

She went back to her own life, determined to become a housewife, to see if she could not love her husband and her home.  But everything he did irritated her, and everything in the house made her feel as in a “luxurious cage.”  Yet she was by no means a feminist; she detested “noisy suffragettes”, thought women doctors and lawyers ridiculous, and had been brought up to regard marriage as indissoluble.

Gradually out of the conflict, the chilling fear that she had made a mistake which could not be rectified, the constant irritation and annoyances, the revolt against her own sex feeling and her life situation, arose the neurosis.  It took the form mainly of sudden unaccountable fears with faint dizzy feelings.  The family physician on the aside told me that it was “just a case of a damn fool woman with everybody too good to her.”

What constitutes a “damn fool” will include every person in the world, according to some one else.  It seemed obvious to me that J. was not meant by nature to be a housewife or any kind of wife.  Matrimonially she was a misfit, unless she met some man of a type like herself, though I doubt if any man could have pleased her.  I doubt if her over-exacting taste would not rebel against the animal in life itself.  For though the animal of life is essentially as fine as the human, certain types find it impossible to acknowledge it in themselves.

At any rate I advised separation for a time,—­six months at least.  I told the woman her reaction to her husband was abnormal and finicky.  She answered that she knew this but could not conceive of any change.  We discussed the matter in all its ramifications, and though she and her husband agreed to the separation, I knew that he was determined to hold her to her contract.  She improved somewhat but I believe that such a temperament is incompatible with marriage, at least to such a man.  The outlook is therefore a poor one.

Case VI.  The over-conscientious housewife,—­the seeker of perfection.

The woman whose history is to be discussed comes from a family of New England stock, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon strain modified by New England climate, diet, history, religion, and tradition into a distinct type.  This type, often traditionally conservative and often extraordinarily radical, has this prevailing trait,—­standards of right and wrong are set up somehow or other, and a remarkably consistent effort is made to maintain these inflexibly.  However, the hyperconscientious are not peculiarly New England alone; I have met Jewish women, Italians, French, Irish, and Negroes who showed the same loyalty to a self-imposed ideal.