518
PARTISAN REVIEW
house, it seemed to me perfectly normal: looking out on my series of
glimpses from the point of my visit today, the first picture I saw was of
Ellen as a girl, and the next was of Ellen as a young woman; further on
she was middle-aged-and
was~'t
this the natural sequence? I beheld
her growing older, didn't I? I had a feeling of unreality, yet I couldn't
see it any other way. Giddily and intently I listened, inquiring, when
it seemed necessary for me to say something: "Did your father prescribe
anything for that?" or "How often have you been having these attacks?"
But she needed no prompting to talk. I got the impression that she
was rather hypochondriac and was gloating over the tale of her symptoms.
She was not at ·all restrained by the prudery which might have gone with
the upholstery of her costume: she was the daughter of an enlightened
doctor and she had been taught not to shrink from such matters. Though
she was dignified and restrained in the extreme, the very patient objec–
tivity and exactitude with which she described her disorders somehow
made demands on the hearer for astonishment and commiseration, and
I found myself evincing in my expression and tone a graver and graver
concern. "I dare say," she continued, "that my condition has been aggra·
vated by the domestic situation-I suppose my father told you about it."
"A little," I replied: I was remembering what Ellen had told me about
her parents. "I don't know," she werit on with pretended detachment but
deadly masochistic hatefulness, "whether a n()rmal parturition is possible
under circumstances of that kind: continual scenes that are deeply dis–
turbing and the uncertainty every night as to whether my husband is
coming home." "Can't you stay down here?" I suggested. "I don't want to
stay longer than two or three days: I'm afraid of what might happen to
him without me. When one thinks how even men of fine character like
Mr. Schroeder and ·General Grant-1 don't mean that my husband isn't
a man of fine character, but he is unstable and a little irresponsible-but
when one thinks how even men like that have been ruined and humiliated!"
She now went on to tell nie in detail about a physical examination
which had been given her by her regular obstetrician and which had
disclosed certain structural conditions that he was afraid might make
childbirth difficult. "What does your father say about it?" I asked. "He
tells me that he doesn't think it's serious, but he wished to consult you."
The idea was somehow conveyed to me that she wanted to be advised that
it would he dangerous for her to have a baby-not, I thought, that she
wouldn't go through with it hut she wanted to make her husband suffer
by continual complaint and reproach. I felt that I must bite off the inter·
view and escape from that horrible house. Ellen's mother's cold eye and
her reasonable smile which masked the morbidity of her pregnancy were
exercising over me an influence that I had to struggle to break.
"Everything is so uncertain, isn't it?" Mrs. Terhune was saying–
"with all these dreadful disasters. One doesn't know what kind of world
one is bringing one's children into. People lose all their resources over
night, and one doesn't want a child not to have the things that one has
