Revelations of a Wife The Story of a Honeymoon

Excerpt

I

"I WILL BE HAPPY! I WILL! I WILL!"

Today we were married.

I have said these words over and over to myself, and now I have written them, and the written characters seem as strange to me as the uttered words did. I cannot believe that I, Margaret Spencer, 27 years old, I who laughed and sneered at marriage, justifying myself by the tragedies and unhappiness of scores of my friends, I who have made for myself a place in the world's work with an assured comfortable income, have suddenly thrown all my theories to the winds and given myself in marriage in as impetuous, unreasoning fashion as any foolish schoolgirl.

I shall have to change a word in that last paragraph. I forgot that
I am no longer Margaret Spencer, but Margaret Graham, Mrs. Richard
Graham, or, more probably, Mrs. "Dicky" Graham. I don't believe
anybody in the world ever called Richard anything but "Dicky."

On the other hand, nobody but Richard ever called me anything shorter than my own dignified name. I have been "Madge" to him almost ever since I knew him.

Dear, dear Dicky! If I talked a hundred years I could not express the difference between us in any better fashion. He is "Dicky" and I am "Margaret."

He is downstairs now in the smoking room, impatiently humoring this lifelong habit of mine to have one hour of the day all to myself.

My mother taught me this when I was a tiny girl. My "thinking hour," she called it, a time when I solved my small problems or pondered my baby sins. All my life I have kept up the practice. And now I am going to devote it to another request of the little mother who went away from me forever last year.

"Margaret, darling," she said to me on the last day we ever talked together, "some time you are going to marry—you do not think so now, but you will—and how I wish I had time to warn you of all the hidden rocks in your course! If I only had kept a record of those days of my own unhappiness, you might learn to avoid the wretchedness that was mine. Promise me that if you marry you will write down the problems that confront you and your solution of them, so than when your own baby girl comes to you and grows into womanhood she may be helped by your experience."

Poor little mother! Her marriage with my father had been one of those wretched tragedies, the knowledge of which frightens so many people away from the altar. I have no memory of my father. I do not know today whether he be living or dead. When I was 4 years old he ran away with the woman who had been my mother's most intimate friend. All my life has been warped by the knowledge. Even now, worshipping Dicky as I do, I am wondering as I sit here, obeying my mother's last request, whether or not an experience like hers will come to me.

A fine augury for our happiness when such thoughts as this can come to me on my wedding day!

Dicky is an artist, with all the faults and all the lovable virtues of his kind. A week ago I was a teacher, holding one of the most desirable positions in the city schools. We met just six months ago, two of the most unsuited people who could be thrown together....