Letty Fox by Christina Stead

unflagging energy for three, four, or five days. The mood would disappear in some minute of some day and we would once more sit blankly or stand jigging vacantly round a chair and repeat, “What will we do?” Many projects were presented, reviewed, rejected, before the next project—religion, mother love, slander, theft—was decided upon. Some projects were shabby imitations of the wickedness of other young desperadoes we heard or read about in children’s books.
    In all this world of tumble and fun, we did not at first see that there was trouble in our family. Jacky first saw it and I scoffed. Then I saw it, and we turned the trouble into another hilarious project; we became “Clark Gable and Joan Crawford” in a hog-calling scene imitated from movie (and Reno) ideas of marital dialogue.

3
    S olander had seen his wife Mathilde first as a somber girl, and he had let her feel him near her for years while she was struggling to make something of herself. She became used to his loyalty, which she rewarded by a hasty lunch near his office, a walk at nightfall near her home, an arm for his arm when she needed an escort. She confided things to him and listened to his interminable explanations. She lived in the heart of things, and the rest of the world, through him, spun round her. When she was lovesick over one boy actor or another, he saw, knew, grew anxious, ran them down a little, hoped for the worst. Once he saw her in a socialist procession, wearing low-heeled shoes and a skating skirt, black on top, red underneath. She walked stoutly along, shouting when they shouted, like a brave child. Her loose hair framed her pale face, without lipstick or powder; it was the lonely face of a pretty woman who cannot understand why she suffers so much, but who knows already that she must.
    Solander never looked at any other women, though he liked them and talked to them; he would think to himself that he was rather lonely at times, but “I am a one-woman man,” he said to himself. He supposed he would get her at last; and when she agreed, hesitating, to marry him, after her last miserable love affair with the faun-boy, he thought naturally, “When she knows what the love of a man is, she will forget all this and love me; experiment is always unsatisfactory.”
    She began serious family life by keeping her baby when it started, even though they were not sure they wanted it. She thought, “This will let us see where we stand; and if it doesn’t work out, one child’s nothing; I’ll get a divorce. Oh, to get out of the worry of the world. He loves me, he will keep me.” They married. She felt a new joy and thought that now for the first time she had some reason for living. “I tried to be someone; now I see that real happiness is in being no one, in effacing yourself according to the rules of society.” She had all kinds of sayings; but as no learned roles fit experiences, she wished sometimes that she had met the right man. She had no idea how much she depended on Solander, for it seemed to her she was full of ideas, when she repeated his. The art she really knew, that she was born for, by which, with unaffected, persistent work, day and night, asleep and awake, she was able to form her plastic soul to take on the shape of another’s, or even force a playwright’s imaginings to be reborn in the flavor of her own mind, this she neglected, as being unreal, not the real world. She threw away all she really knew and repeated political and economic phrases, correctly and credulously, but without inner understanding.
    The poor apartment was now hung with children’s clothes. She heard her husband air the opinions of various smart young men with whom he was infatuated (for he was an ardent lover of his friends, as well), and she wondered if he had any ability. He, meanwhile, asked himself if he were not, like many men, laughing and talking, even making love, in a