They had made up their minds not to have any children;
theirs was to be a true, spiritual marriage, and the world was to be
made to realise that a woman, too, has a soul, and is not merely sex.
Husband and wife met at dinner in the evening. It really was a true
marriage, the union of two souls; it was, of course, also the union of
two bodies, but this is a point one does not discuss.
One day the wife came home and told her husband that her office hours
had been changed. The directors had decided to run a new night train
to Malmo, and in future she would have to be at her office from six to
nine in the evening. It was a nuisance, for he could not come home
before six. That was quite impossible.
Henceforth they had to dine separately and meet only at night. He was
dissatisfied. He hated the long evenings.
He fell into the habit of calling for her. But he found it dull to sit
on a chair in the goods department and have the porters knocking against
him. He was always in the way. And when he tried to talk to her as she
sat at her desk with the penholder behind her ear, she interrupted him
with a curt:
"Oh! do be quiet until I've done!"
Then the porters turned away their faces and he could see by their
backs that they were laughing.
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