One evening I was scanning some article on marriage by the fire in Seattle—­it was one of those rare times that Carl too was at home and going over lectures for the next day.  It held that, to be successful, marriage had to be an adjustment—­a giving in here by the man, there by the woman.

I said to Carl:  “If that is true, you must have been doing all the adjusting; I never have had to give up, or fit in, or relinquish one little thing, so you’ve been doing it all.”

He thought for a moment, then answered:  “You know, I’ve heard that too, and wondered about it.  For I know I’ve given up nothing, made no ‘adjustments.’  On the contrary, I seem always to have been getting more than a human being had any right to count on.”

It was that way, even to the merest details, such as both liking identically the same things to eat, seasoned the identical way.  We both liked to do the identical things, without a single exception.  Perhaps one exception—­he had a fondness in his heart for firearms that I could not share. (The gleam in his eyes when he got out his collection every so often to clean and oil it!) I liked guns, provided I did not have to shoot at anything alive with them; but pistols I just plain did not like at all.  We rarely could pass one of these shooting-galleries without trying our luck at five cents for so many turns—­at clay pigeons or rabbits whirling around on whatnots; but that was as wild as I ever wanted to get with a gun.

We liked the same friends without exception, the same books, the same pictures, the same music.  He wrote once:  “We (the two of us) love each other, like to do things together (absolutely anything), don’t need or want anybody else, and the world is ours.”  Mrs. Willard once told me that if she had read about our life together in a book, she would not have believed it.  She did not know that any one on earth could live like that.  Perhaps that is one reason why I want to tell about it—­because it was just so plain wonderful day in, day out.  I feel, too, that I have a complete record of our life.  For fourteen years, every day that we were not together we wrote to each other, with the exception of two short camping-trips that Carl made, where mail could be sent out only by chance returning campers.

Somehow I find myself thinking here of our wedding anniversaries,—­spread over half the globe,—­and the joy we got out of just those ten occasions.  The first one was back in Oakland, after our return from Seattle.  We still had elements of convention left in us then,—­or, rather, I still had some; I don’t believe Carl had a streak of it in him ever,—­so we dressed in our very best clothes, dress-suit and all, and had dinner at the Key Route Inn, where we had gone after the wedding a year before.  After dinner we rushed home, I nursed the son, we changed into natural clothes, and went to the circus.  I had misgivings about the circus being a fitting wedding-anniversary celebration; but what was one to do when the circus comes to town but one night in the year?