In every letter I can sense the buoyancy of spirit that comes with the laying down of responsibility. Here he had so much, and now he is only a nut in the great machine of war, and so long as he does his duty and obeys orders he can have an easy and comfortable mind.
He is stationed at the moment up in what is the frozen north, but they are the hills of home, and he is assuredly content. He is not even homesick, though always asking when I am coming. I am waiting for Effie’s next leave, when we will go up together. Meanwhile I must hold the fort here, or all the wrong wall papers will go up, and there might even be structural undoing if the workmen were left to their own sweet wills. But it is an empty life, Cornelia, out of which the soul has gone. Even the picture in uniform, on my desk, the man of the house at war, fails to afford the uplift or the comfort once imagined. I must get through with this reconstruction job as it affects material things, and start the reconstruction of my own inner life. I, too, must go to the war.
I had your dear letter yesterday and have every word of it by heart, even George’s postscript. I always knew him to be an understanding creature, but his knowledge of human beings, more especially the heart of woman, is a wee bit uncanny.
Is he your product, Cornelia, or is he just the American husband at his best? It is long since you told me (it was on that wonderful testing first visit which we essayed fearfully—not sure whether it would grapple us to one another with hooks of steel or merely end in a polite parting with regrets on either side) that English husbands are not properly brought up. You imagined, or really perceived, in them a lordly air of superiority—and even said that some of our households bear the impress of the feudal age in which our race was cradled.
I remember wanting to say that the criticism did not, and could not, apply to Scotch husbands. But perhaps wisely I held my peace.
We left it, what is called in Scotland "a moot point"—and a moot point, I guess, it must remain. Anyway, wherever George got his knowledge, whether natural or acquired, he has gripped the essence of this thing when he calls separation the supreme test of the bond. I am going to write to him when I am through with this, and you are not to see that letter, nor yet ask to see it—I need him—I want the man’s point of view.