Love Lies Dreaming Read Online Free PDF

unbearably oppressive, and in the end when I slipped out for my morning coffee only a walk in St. James’s Park could put matters right. So into the park I went—to find matters made worse. It was a Council School holiday, and the park was full of ragged parties of children from the mewses, and from the slums on the other side of the river. Children everywhere, flaunting their dirty noses and their dingy rags, spoiling for every one else the bright sunshine and the glitter of the lake. And here and there were leisured people walking lazily along the paths—neat pink-faced men silk hatted and gloved and spatted, and splendid women, wonderfully dressed, strolling placidly along with the insolent carelessness of their kind. The world was decidedly out of joint.
    I sat down in the corner freest from children that I could find, and proceeded to brood over the business until I was genuinely and thoroughly miserable. It seemed as if all my little ambitions were certain of disappointment. I had been looking forward to the time when the growing success of my books would set me free from the shackles of the office, when Constance and I would have the world before us and twenty-fourhours every day to see it in; when we would be able to drift round Italy, and make that motor-boat tour of the French rivers and canals to which we had been looking forward ever since I had made the suggestion before we were married. This change in affairs would alter all that. I could see in my mind’s eye the inroads into my jealously-guarded deposit account that doctor’s fees and nurses’ fees and nursing home charges would make. That deposit account was to me much more than money (money means very little to me); it signified besides the slow approach of freedom and independence. And there would be no drifting round Italy with a baby to look after—and certainly there would be no motor-boat life. We would be tied down to a domestic existence. A sudden torrent of the stale old jokes about the distracted father walking the bedroom at midnight with a wailing child in his arms surged up in my mind and intensified the generally jaundiced appearance of the landscapes.
    I wanted to be rich and free. I do not think that I particularly envied the morning-coated individuals walking past me, but I know that I was jealous for Constance’s sake of the opulent women at their sides.I wanted her to be able to stroll through the park in the same fashion, wearing, as she would do so well, the equivalent of all my present deposit account. I wanted—I wanted everything which seemed so impossible to obtain that morning.
    There were other things besides. I knew for the first time what it meant to be jealous. I was jealous of this child who was to absorb so much of Constance’s attention and love. From being the first person in her regard I would drop into second place—and from what I know of Constance, second place is nowhere as regards her affections. There was even a hateful, distressing feeling that perhaps Constance had never loved me as much as I had believed and hoped. Perhaps she had only looked upon me from the first as a convenient baby-provider. I even went so far as to let my thoughts stray back to Dewey, about whom I had not thought for years. The hateful suspicion that it was Dewey who held Constance’s love, and that I was only a substitute, an inadequate one, suddenly matured in my mind without any foundation at all. I could have kicked myself for thinking such a thing, and yet I went on thinking it. Baby John,still eight months from being born, was responsible already for a great deal.
    The scene changed quite suddenly. Perhaps it was the sunshine and the brightness of the grass and the lake, but I do not think so. My theory is that it was brought about by my one real gift—the ability to visualize things and to make them real to my mind’s eye. It is a habit of mine to which much is due, my books, my fits