The final courtship of Joan Wellman of Port Smith coincided with those events. From Mike’s behavior and the bits of information he dropped in conversation, Leland gathered that, over the previous three years, the romance had been governed pretty much by Joan’s immaturity and caprice. Twice, in disgust with her, Mike had walked out. The first time they had resumed, it had been at his instigation; the second time, at hers. The second resumption had come just before the start of the partnership, and in the new office Leland observed Mike wrestling with the decision long after he had made it. He had never had difficulty with women in the simpler situations of seduction and shacking up, and if there never had been a game called football, his good looks and easygoing manner would have attracted both the jelly beans and the more complicated women whose lives precluded all honesty save that over the coffee and after the hotels and trips out of town. He gave in to Joan in spite of what he thought was going to be the futility of it all. It was something Leland could see. Mike seemed to be consciously accepting a degree of unhappiness the way a snake slowly swallows a frog. After three years, there could be no meaningful concessions from Joan; yet, apparently, she and Mike were only beginning to have intercourse. By the expression on Mike’s face, she was crying afterward, reporting the lateness of her periods when they were only a day overdue, calling him long-distance in the late hours of the night and having nothing to say—all extensions of what she had done with him before. Her trouble did not have much to do with sex; if she had little taste for sex, Mike’s torment would have been of another kind, and far worse. Her trouble was her trouble, a child’s reaction to her own desire. She had to have Mike, and she didn’t like it; she didn’t like the feeling of need, which had finally left her vulnerable. Then things happened too quickly, their engagement, parties, a wedding—a promise grimly and hopefully kept—a house given, furnished; in the excitement nothing was settled except the fact of their marriage, which they had to accommodate however they could. Love was what a man made it; what they had decided gave Mike little cause to suspect that he did not love his wife, or that she did not love him. With love believed—as Joan, too, believed it—the rest began, the two altered but not changed by believing; and because they believed, basically they were satisfied. The act of marriage itself was the continuing unconscious testament of good faith; unconsciously it created love. Many marriages began in more bitter and imperfectly resolved crises—only a few men did not know that—but the parties thereto were right if they remembered just the decision they had made: that settled it, whatever each of the parties was and had to be. Mike never would be interested in someone simpler—it did not figure, because he saw only the good in Joan, however inadequate, just as he saw it in everyone else; and Joan never could begin a search for someone to match her, scheme for plot, because that would mean having to battle for the control over her situation that she already possessed. Meanwhile their decision remained in force and the testament continued: it was settled. The sacrifices were small. When they were not faced with the effect on them, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Leland knew that as well as anyone.