Conjugal Love

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FIRST of all I wish to speak of my wife. Loving, apart from many other things, means taking a delight in looking at and watching the loved one. Taking a delight, that is to say, in contemplating not merely the beauties but also the defects, whether they be few or many, of that person. From the very first days of our married life, I found an inestimable pleasure in looking at Leda (that is her name), and in studying even the most insignificant and fleeting movements and expressions of her face and body. My wife, at the time we were married (later, after she had borne three children, certain of her characteristics were, I do not say changed, but to some extent modified), was just over thirty years old. She was, if not exactly tall, above the middle height; and her face and figure were both very beautiful, though far from perfect. Her long, thin face had a withdrawn, dazed, almost obliterated look, like that of a classical deity in some old picture of mediocre quality in which the vagueness of the painting is increased by the patina of age. This strange look of intangible beauty which, like a gleam of sunshine on a wall or the shadow of a cloud passing over the sea, might vanish at any moment, came without doubt partly from her hair, which was of a metallic fairness and always a little untidy, with long trailing locks that seemed to suggest a flutter of fear or flight, and partly from her blue eyes, which were enormous and slightly slanting, with dilated, glistening pupils whose troubled, evasive glance suggested, as did her hair, a state of mind both frightened and shy.

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