Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/96

I have told him that if he wants to be married in October he must find some other girl to marry him. We have had our first quarrel. He is hurt and unhappy, and has gone to town. I cannot see why I need feel called upon to miss him quite so much—not so preposterously. I should not mind if I missed him only to a reasonable extent. He has telephoned that he is not coming out to-night. James answered the telephone. I was out watching Job catch grasshoppers, an exhilarating, not to say exalted, occupation. It was wet, too, and I came in too soppy and moppy for anything. There is a fog to-day. It wipes out the world as if it were a vast sponge. Happiness, I think, is only a little. white writing on a slate: it looks as if it would last forever, but it is only chalk; the first touch expunges it. My slate is gone suddenly blank and black.

Two of our old fishermen are putting out in their old dories from the beach. They melt into the fog like thoughts. There! they are gone out utterly. They are so old that I cannot even wonder how they feel. Age seems to me like a mighty mist into which people dip and vanish slowly, and between them and the sympathy of youth an unfathomable fog shuts in. I stand