In marriage, a man’s chance of happiness—of survival, it almost seemed—depends far more on his knowledge of himself than of his wife. One doesn’t mean the trying first year of adjustment which, long enough, has been the concern of comedy. For many men, the realer period comes later, ten, a dozen, or fifteen years, when fatigue has set in. At twenty-­some, he knows why he married. At forty he is far from sure. He asks himself: What am I getting out of it; what keeps us going; is it worth it?—To answer such questions, he must be aware not only of the immediate problem or crisis that prompts them, but of his life as a whole.

His feet moved into a soft sandy path; he had reached the bend where the road wound back from the bluff to Sconset village. If he stayed on the macadam he would lose his way; the thing to do was to continue straight along the dirt road which gradually descended as the bluff diminished, and turn back when he got tired. This path would be safer; besides less chance of getting lost, there would also be less danger of being run down by a motorcar in the fog, coming home late from the Yacht Club party.

Half of his childhood had been spent looking forward to the pleasures of adulthood when he would be old enough to take life in his own hands and do something with it; yet how free was a man to do this, how much was the choice ever his? What he had found was surely far different from what he had expected to find. He had always been living in the future, and was still, at the age of forty-­four, in the habit of doing so. All of his courtship, as well as the first years of his marriage, had been but a promise of further delights to come. When their first child arrived, no man had been happier or more proud than he; yet reality was not the same as dream. Had that early happiness been illusion, like the dreams of his youth? He was in exactly the same position of which he had charged Ethel only a few months ago, when he had accused her of being unrealistic about marriage; to her, marriage automatically meant happiness. He was living under the same delusion, for that’s what it had meant to him; instead of which, marriage was something one had to work at, constantly, continually, daily; never more than now.