Susanna was not unlettered, but she certainly had never read
Meredith or she would have learned that "love is an affair of two, and only
for two that can be as quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and
earth, through the cloud, or face to face. They take their breath of life from
each other in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to
admiration. But a solitary soul dragging a log must make the log a God to
rejoice in the burden." The demigod that poor, blind Susanna married had
vanished, and she could drag the log no longer, but she made one mistake in
judging her husband, in that she regarded him, at thirty-two, as a finished
product, a man who was finally this and that, and behaved thus and so, and
would never be any different.
The "age of discretion" is a movable feast of extraordinary uncertainty, and
John Hathaway was a little behindhand in overtaking it. As a matter of fact,
he had never for an instant looked life squarely in the face. He took a casual
glance at it now and then, after he was married, but it presented no very
distinguishable features, nothing to make him stop and think, nothing to
arouse in him any special sense of responsibility.
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