Emotional experience, family lore, household chores, the familiarization of faces that a year ago had not existed for her—and then she was in the second year of her marriage. The second year was more of the same, but more of other things as well. She could, for instance, go to Krafft’s in the morning and the people on the street would not point her out or stare at her; she was conscious of the difference between the earlier half-hostile politeness and the casual respect she was given as Abraham Lockwood’s daughter-in-law. They were getting used to her, and she to them. It had been a crowded year, never again would a year seem so crowded, and she began to do many things by habit and thus have more time to notice things, but more than things she noticed people, persons, individual human beings with individual characteristics. Notably and inevitably she began to observe George Lockwood, and quite undramatically, without reason, in her mind she convicted him of infidelity.
In the first year he was all men in one man, and what he did and did not do was all she knew of the ways of men. Whatever he did was what men did, and it took that first year of marriage to separate George Lockwood from the mass of Man and to disperse other men from the vicinity of George Lockwood. As an only child she had wished for but learned to do without a confidante and to work things out for herself, and if the method did not make life easier, it had the virtue of accustoming her to introspection and inner debate. Likewise, in her case, it had sharpened if not quickened her judgment and her self-reliance. It gave her confidence in her judgment and her own resources. Something was wrong in George Lockwood’s behavior, and since it was she who was suspecting that something was wrong, the something surely had to do with other women.
But as the months went by he continued to give her no reason to be suspicious. It became not so much a question of catching him in a slip as in catching herself in a false silent accusation. With nothing to go on, she had to give him the benefit of a doubt that she did not honestly feel. Then as time passed and she accepted the fact that he was too clever for her, she found that she was becoming reconciled to an offense that she had not been able to charge him with. And at that point she began to be afraid of him because she admitted to herself that fear of him—and of being in error; the two were interchangeable —had kept her from giving utterance to her suspicions. She had always been afraid of him, always from the very beginning, and yet as soon as she acknowledged this truth her fear of him was less distressing. Her loneliness, for example, had been caused by her fear of him. She wondered if fear of him had not caused her to lose her first child.
But fear of him, why? Other women might have reason to fear a husband’s beatings, drunkenness, stinginess, or whatever, but from George Lockwood she feared none of those cruelties. More time passed before she discovered that what she feared, what she had been fearing, was the very thing she suspected: his infidelity, his desire for other women, the horrible fear that she would lose him to another woman, and the knowledge that she could no longer live without him. At last she discovered the dominant, pervasive truth: she loved him. It was not a good love, not the love she believed existed and had always hoped for, but Agnes Lockwood, secretly proud of her individuality, knew that this was the love for her. Opportunity had come and gone, but the other sweet and dear love had not stayed with her, and this love had stayed. Thereafter she was invulnérable to assault by George Lockwood’s infidelity, and when she no longer needed additional proof, when he ceased to be too clever for her, she was on the verge of laughing in his face. Love born of fear, fear born of love. It didn’t matter very much. Sweet and dear love would not last anyway with a woman who could love George Lockwood. Here lay a great and important truth for Agnes Lockwood: the fact that she could love George Lockwood and did love him established her individuality. She had always believed in her individuality, that she was perhaps a bit brighter than other girls, that she did not think the way they did (echoing the thoughts they had heard from their parents and teachers), that she did not like all of the same things they liked. And now she had a husband who would not be the man she would choose for her sister, if she had had one, but she had married him and she was content—if often far from serene. He was her partner in the full experience of life, and if he was selfish and neglectful, he was her partner nonetheless. He gave almost nothing of himself, but the discovery that this was so in his relations with her came after her discovery that it was so in his relations with everyone else. He was not, in other words, making any cruel distinction in his treatment of her. He was that way with everybody. As the months and years rolled on she became convinced that the only cruel distinction he made was in his treatment of his other women, whoever they were. Agnes Lockwood acquired an extra sense that informed her that one woman was gone and a new one was taking over; but none of them really took over. She was the continuing one, his wife, and one day she was able to face her jealousy, to admit to it retroactively because it was gone.
She was pregnant, in her seventh month, and the doctor had told her it would be safer to suspend sexual relations with her husband. “How long is this going to be?” said George Lockwood.
“Well—the doctor says three months, anyway,” said Agnes.
“Three months!”
“Maybe four.”
“It’s due in two.”
“But I don’t know how soon we can start after it’s born. The doctor says not so soon if we want to have more children. I can make you feel good without.”
“That’s not the same.”
“It’s all I can do for a while. I’m sorry, George,” she said. “I want to, too, you know, but my bust is so sensitive.”
“I hope they stay the way they are—I don’t mean sensitive, but the size they are.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want to go with another woman?”
“What other woman?”
“Oh, there are that kind of women.”
“You mean whores?”
“Yes, but not just the kind the farm boys go to. There must be places in Reading and Philadelphia. I know there are. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“What if I went to one of those places? What would you say afterwards?”
“You wouldn’t have to tell me,” she said.
“Oh. Then as long as you didn’t know, you wouldn’t mind so much?”
“I’d know, but you wouldn’t have to tell me.”
“You’d know? How could you tell?”
“You wouldn’t be so restless.”
“Restless. Is that the way I get?”
“Yes,” she said. She knew he was thinking, wondering whether his restlessness ever had betrayed him, but in the dark she could not see his face.
“Why don’t you say something? Are you asleep?” he said.
“I was waiting for you to say something,” she said.
“I was thinking. You wouldn’t mind if I went with another woman, and paid her?”
“I’d mind, but I wouldn’t want to talk about it. I’d consider it something you had to do, because you’re a man. That’s why there are that kind of women, because men are so weak.”
“Men are weak?”
“Morally weak, yes. Governed by their appetites, willing to cheapen themselves, just to feel good for a few minutes. You wouldn’t want to be seen with that kind of woman, but did you ever stop to think what those women think of the men? The lowest kind of woman, I don’t care how much you pay her, and the men are willing to get undressed and put their hard things into them. But how do you feel after you come in a woman like that? You don’t love her, I’m sure.”