People married and
lived together. Marriage, he considered, was rather the end of
things.
But he was older now, and he knew that marriage was a beginning and
not an end. It did not change people fundamentally. It only
changed their habits.
His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was
the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that
they differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common
ground at all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did
not put it that way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness,
lost desires, and the wreckage of years of dissension.
It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties,
but he wondered some times if all of life was either looking
forward or looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that
for Clayton, who still looked like a boy, there should be nothing
but his day at the mill, his silent evening at home, or some
stodgy dinner-party where the women were all middle-aged, and the
other men a trifle corpulent.
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