After the first time or two, Mary didn't seem to enjoy the theatre. She told me one night, when we got a bit confidential, that the play had depressed her, and made her sad.
"How's that?" I asked.
"Well, Joe," she said, "I don't want to hurt you, Joe, but, if you must know, I was thinking all the time of the past—of our own lives."
That hurt me and made me wild. I'd been thinking, too, all the time I was watching the play, of life as it was, and my own dull, sordid, hopeless, monotonous life in particular. But I hadn't been thinking of hers. The truth seemed that we were getting on each other's nerves—we'd been too long together alone in the Bush; and it isn't good for a man and his wife to be too much alone. I at least had come to think that when Mary said unpleasant things she only did it to irritate me.
"What are you always raking up the past for?" I said. "Can't you have done with it? Ain't I doing my best to make you happy? What more do you want?"
"I want a good many little things, Joe," said Mary.
We quarrelled then, but in the hard, cold, quiet, sarcastic way we'd got into lately—not the old short, fierce quarrel of other days, when we'd make it up, and love each other all the more afterwards. I don't know how much I hurt her, but I know she cut me to the heart sometimes, as a woman can cut a man.
Next evening I went out alone, and didn't get
