'I didn't quite say that,' I said. 'But knowledge, other people's knowledge, does inevitably modify what it touches. Remember the legend of Psyche, whose child, if she told about her pregnancy, would be mortal, whereas if she kept silent it would be a god.' It was an unfortunate speech on which to part from Georgie, for it brought our minds back to something which I at least preferred never now to think about. Last spring my beloved had become pregnant. There was nothing to be done but to get rid of the child. Georgie had gone through with the hideous business in the manner that I would have expected of her, calm, laconic, matter-of-fact, even cheering me along with her surly wit. We had found it exceedingly difficult to discuss the matter even at the time, and we had not spoken of it since. What vast wound that catastrophe had perhaps made in Georgie's proud and upright spirit I did not know. For myself, I got off with an extraordinary ease. Because of Georgie's character, her toughness and the stoical nature of her devotion to me, I had not had to pay. It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of a punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour. Two
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way. In my own marriage I early established myself as the one who took rather than gave. Like Dr Johnson, I started promptly upon the way in which I intended to go on. I was the more zealous in doing so in that I was counted by the world, and counted myself, very lucky to have got Antonia.