Here my last love died. The disconnected feeling. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. As I lay awake in that dark hour, I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a wife might feel, who, in the fourth year of her marriage, suddenly knew that she had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once beloved husband; no pleasure in his company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything he might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the feeling of disconnectedness and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of duty. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconcilliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in his voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognised the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in his eyes, and the selfish, hard set corners of his mouth. I learned him, as one must learn a man one has kept house with, day in and day out, for three and a half years; I learned his ways, the routine and mechanism of his charm, his jealousy and self-seeking, and his nervous trick with the fingers when he was lying. He was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew him for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.