Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/162

told me to go to bed, and that she could be trusted with Luella. I can't do it. I don't think I could do it even if Dana had got home; and he won't be here till half-past eleven. He telephoned that it was very important, something political, and that if the child were out of danger, he would take the eleven-two; unless, he said, I wished him to come right out? I told him to do as he pleased, and that it was not at all necessary.

He is away so much that he does not seem necessary in these days to very much of anything. I suppose most wives have that feeling. I hope they do not all have another, which persists and pursues me—this feeling hurt, hurt all the time. My whole soul is raw, as if it were flayed with some petty instrument or utensil, like an awl or a grater; something not to be dignified as a weapon.

He says he loves the child as much as I do. I thought at first that we should grow nearer and be dearer on account of the baby. But I am kept at home so much with her, and I can't go about, as I used to do, with him; and Dana hates sickness, and all babies are ailing more or less. Even the experience of parentage, which I thought was to unite, seems subtly to divide us. Everything almost that we experience de-