Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/93

It is a week since he came to the Wave. (That is what we have agreed to call this house.) I used to think I knew what it was to be happy. Now I see that I had not studied the grammar of joy. Dana says:

"You have not learned the alphabet yet. You play truant too often."

"Why don't you keep me in school, then?" I said. "That is your business."

He made me no answer at all, and that is what makes me uncomfortable. When he speaks I know the worst. But when he only looks at me, I am afraid of him and of what is coming. He has a terrible way of biding his time. I never know when he is done with a subject.

There is something that never was on sea or land about these days. I seem afloat, all the time, between the ocean and the sky; and if my feet touch the earth, they spurn it, as if they had wings, and I go whirling off and up. Now I am a creature of the air; height is my element; flight is the condition of being, and I flee. Then I am flung down swiftly, and find myself a creature of the sea; the deeps are my home; to be engulfed is the condition of being, and I drown. There are moments when I am tossed and driven blindly, and traverse vast spaces of the under-sea, visit sunken wrecks, float