Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/138

I never used to be a crying girl; I am quite ashamed of the number of times a week I lock myself into my own rooms to have it out with myself. I suppose it is a physical condition. Nobody sees but Job. He jumps into my lap, more gently than he used to, and kisses my wet face. Heaven knows how he understands that drops on a cheek mean grief in the heart. Sometimes I think that perception of the finer states of one we love is in relation to dumbness. Words, protestations, impulses of the lip, come to mean less as love means more. One of the sages was he who said that conduct is three fourths of life.

Our cottage is done and we move in to-morrow. It is the night before I leave my father's home for our own. There has been too much to do, and I am not quite equal now to the tax upon my strength. I was always such a well, strong girl—poised, I think, in soul and body. Physical malaise is a foreigner to me, and there is no common vocabulary between it and myself. No girl thinks of this. When I expected to be most comforted I find myself most solitary. I suppose it is a common, or at least a frequent, experience. Men are so busy and so insolently strong. There is something cruel in their physical freedom.

No woman deity could ever have constructed