In late September Matthew began to cut the corn in the field which he had ploughed a year ago when Ellen went away. He began early in the morning and worked doggedly and alone. The next day he would have help, but to-day he rejoiced--if so bright a word could describe his state of mind--in his loneliness. He breathed heavily; he was angry and mortified. His life had not turned out as he had expected; he had made, it was now perfectly clear, a basic error from the effect of which he should never escape. He had always believed that one could direct one's life and that so intelligent a person as himself could direct it successfully, but he had been mistaken.
He had chosen his wife with impeccable judgment--she was pretty and quiet and domestic and religious and troubled by no unbecoming ambition. She was still all of these, but each quality had been modified in some unexpected way. Her prettiness was spoiled by untidiness; her quietness was only quietness in comparison with the clatter of her family; her housewifely accomplishments proved slighter than he had expected; and her religion was, though he did not realize it, a good deal like his own, a possession for eternity, but of little practical use in this life.
She had slipped back quickly into the idioms which she had once tried to weed from her speech in order to please him, and little Matthew who was learning to talk copied her. About this subject she had already quarreled with her husband whom she accused of being ashamed of her.
He had not reckoned upon the physical depression which accompanies the bearing of children of whom there were now two. Millie was preoccupied with her sensations; she was constantly on the watch for fresh symptoms which she retailed to whoever would listen. The description of her morning miseries greeted Matthew's opening eyes; the account of her evening faintness kept him awake at the end of a weary day. She implied that for all her troubles he was to blame; a bride married by capture could have uttered a no more triumphant "Whose fault is it?"
From the pressure of unpleasant conditions Matthew was free only when he was in the fields. Domestic activities were now carried on, except for sleep, in the kitchen, and there on cold evenings even preparations for sleep were made. The fashion in which he had been brought up came to possess for him a moral and religious significance. When he remembered his youth--and he remembered it more and more often--he saw his father working at his desk, a mouselike Ellen by the window, Mrs. Sassaman busy with her tasks in a distant kitchen, and himself in his own room. Each might have if he wished the privacy which was an inalienable right, the solitude in which mind and soul could grow.