Since my marriage, too, I had begun to resent a little the attitude of Tom and Susan and the Blackwoods of humorous yet affectionate tolerance toward my professional activities and financial creed, though Maude showed no disposition to take this seriously.  I did suspect, however, that they were more and more determined to rescue Maude from what they would have termed a frivolous career; and on one of these occasions—­so exasperating in married life when a slight cause for pique tempts husband or wife to try to ask myself whether this affair were only a squall, something to be looked for once in a while on the seas of matrimony, and weathered:  or whether Maude had not, after all, been right when she declared that I had made a mistake, and that we were not fitted for one another?  In this gloomy view endless years of incompatibility stretched ahead; and for the first time I began to rehearse with a certain cold detachment the chain of apparently accidental events which had led up to my marriage:  to consider the gradual blindness that had come over my faculties; and finally to wonder whether judgment ever entered into sexual selection.  Would Maude have relapsed into this senseless fit if she had realized how fortunate she was?  For I was prepared to give her what thousands of women longed for, position and influence.  My resentment rose again against Perry and Tom, and I began to attribute their lack of appreciation of my achievements to jealousy.  They had not my ability; this was the long and short of it....  I pondered also, regretfully, on my bachelor days.  And for the first time, I, who had worked so hard to achieve freedom, felt the pressure of the yoke I had fitted over my own shoulders.  I had voluntarily, though unwittingly, returned to slavery.  This was what had happened.  And what was to be done about it?  I would not consider divorce.

Well, I should have to make the best of it.  Whether this conclusion brought on a mood of reaction, I am unable to say.  I was still annoyed by what seemed to the masculine mind a senseless and dramatic performance on Maude’s part, an incomprehensible case of “nerves.”  Nevertheless, there stole into my mind many recollections of Maude’s affection, many passages between us; and my eye chanced to fall on the ink-well she had bought me out of the allowance I gave her.  An unanticipated pity welled up within me for her loneliness, her despair in that room upstairs.  I got up—­and hesitated.  A counteracting, inhibiting wave passed through me.  I hardened.  I began to walk up and down, a prey to conflicting impulses.  Something whispered, “go to her”; another voice added, “for your own peace of mind, at any rate.”  I rejected the intrusion of this motive as unworthy, turned out the light and groped my way upstairs.  The big clock in the hall struck twelve.

I listened outside the door of the bedroom, but all was silent within.  I knocked.

“Maude!” I said, in a low voice.