The Unsuccessful Husband

Such a day of peace it was, so calm and quiet, with the haze at the window, beginning, and from there going far out over the fields to the river beyond, a morning haze such as the sun soon burns and has done with. Yet all through that day there was quiet and the haze of calm. It was not the first of many such days. None followed. But it became the reminder of something somewhat better than what one had, the stasis of peace which, once found, can always remind one and even be found again. Such a day, a peaceful day, so calm and quiet, one is never done with, no matter how long…

We were married fifteen years ago at a quiet ceremony attended by a very few people, close friends, and following the ceremony we traveled to a place where I had not been since my childhood but where, as it were, I had always lived or at least wanted to. My wife was then a very pretty woman, a quiet face with a smile of destructive calm, and a figure which at the very least provoked one to thoughts not quite in keeping with a usual intention. I cannot say how it was but it was simply that she could not be won, not in the usual manner. Although I do not remember it as deliberate, still I can see now that it was a matter of giving in the old sense such as I had believed no longer to exist. Nothing so much suggested it as when after we had eaten and had spent what was left of the evening reading, perhaps, with some time of quiet conversation, she would at last turn to me with an air of permission and would then rise and set about the task of going to bed. What I had expected was not necessarily more, but certainly something different and when on that first night I was so permitted, I saw that nothing again would ever be as I intended it, never what I had hoped for.