Boys and Girls Come Out to Play Read Online Free PDF Page A

arose between the two of them expressed itself in a purely personal way.
    In the first place, their marriage was the result of feeling that since they were in and out of one another’s apartments so much it would be silly not to arrange things more sensibly. Divver had had to have two bathrobes, one for his place, one for her’s; she had begun by taking over one of his drawers for essential things, and then had gone on to keeping a nightgown and toothbrush there too. Her mother, who knew what was happening, had said hopefully that she supposed on the whole men were more honest these days; to which Divver had said modestly that today honesty was being given a chance for thefirst time in history, and that women at last had a chance to practise it. The girl must have agreed, because she found little peculiar, and nothing insulting, in being admitted without wedlock into every last secret of Divver’s puzzled mind—in fact, a strong point in the affection between them was her tender respect for the way he struggled with the idea of not marrying her, and his shame-faced gratitude to her for not pressing him in the matter. Divver used to say repeatedly that he found her attitude miraculous, considering what an ordinary, selfish, egotistical sort of person he was.
    Everything went well until, in spite of how hard they both tried, Divver grew more and more ashamed of himself. Each new stage of shame she matched with an assurance of fresh respect for him, until it became like a game in which the shuttlecock was shame when he hit it over the net and respect when she hit it back, but the same shuttlecock all the time. It was an exercise that soon left both of them almost too exhausted by shame and respect to go on leading semi-detached lives. “For Christ’s sweet sake, why am I—around like this?” Divver cried one evening after he had drunk too much. “Let’s get together
really,
like civilized people, for God’s sake!”—to which she replied promptly that neither for his sake nor her’s did she want him to take any step that he didn’t really want to take. Perhaps this reply seemed to him to be a reflection on his ability to make up his mind as a man should, because he at once went on to say that lately he had thought the whole business over in a most searching way and could now say with absolute certainty that marriage was what he most wanted. They agreed that a honeymoon would be silly, and though they spent that night together they were too conscious of the gap that deciding to get together had made to do anything but sleep nervously. Divver’s new mother-in-law kissed him warmly, and said that now at last she really knew she was a mother, a remark that made him a little frightened until hiswife said that all mothers felt bound to make it, and that it had no meaning whatever.
    They enjoyed waiting for their respective leases to end, and when they took a new apartment they enjoyed fitting it out with their furniture, and boldly tossing out things that they would never have managed to get rid of alone. Divver was impressed, though he felt self-conscious, when his wife bought a reproduction of Rouault’s “Old King” and hung it in the living-room; she said it was like him.
    At this time there was some talk about the “freedom” they were to allow each other. But freedom was the last thing Mrs. Divver was interested in (she already felt tired), and Max, who thought he ought to want it, became so domesticated, or demoralized, in the first year of marriage that by the time he did feel the need to come and go in a mature way, he couldn’t bring himself to the point of saying so, much less of doing it. His wife even began to urge him to enjoy freedom, but he insisted that he didn’t need any more than he had and would say so when he did.
    The days of matching shame and respect were, of course, far away now; when they looked back on that predicament it seemed completely childish: “though no doubt it was necessary,