"That's neither Luther's fault nor mine," answers the husband. "Just
as it is not necessarily the husband's fault if he doesn't get on with
his wife. Possibly he would get on excellently with another woman."
A dead silence follows; the diners rise from their chairs.
The husband retires to his own room. His wife and her friend leave the
dining-room together and sit down in the pavilion.
"What brutality!" exclaims the friend. "How can you, a sensitive,
intelligent woman, consent to be the servant of that selfish brute?"
"He has never understood me," sighs the wife. Her satisfaction in being
able to pronounce these damning words is so great, that it drowns the
memory of a reply which her husband has given her again and again:
"Do you imagine that your thoughts are so profound that I, a man with
a subtle brain, am unable to fathom them? Has it never occurred to you
that it may be your shallowness which prevents you from understanding
me?"
He sits down in his room, alone. He suffers from remorse, as if he had
struck his mother. But she struck the first blow; she has struck him
blow after blow, for many years, and never once before has he
retaliated.
This coarse, heartless, cynical woman, in whose keeping he confided
his whole soul with all its thoughts and emotions, was conscious of
his superiority, and therefore she humiliated him, dragged him down,
pulled him by the hair, covered him with abuse.
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