My wife has brown hair,dark eyes,and a gentle disposition.Because of her gentle disposition,I sometimes think that she spoils the children.She can’t refuse them anything.They always get around her.Ethel and I have been married for ten years.We both come from Morristown,New Jersey,and I can’t even remember when I first met her.Our marriage has always seemed happy and resourceful to me.We live in a walk-up in the East Fifties.Our son,Carl,who is six,goes to a good private school,and our daughter,who is four,won’t go to school until next year.We often find fault with the way we were educated,but we seem to be struggling to raise our children along the same lines,and when the time comes,I suppose they’ll go to the same school and colleges that we went to.
Ethel graduated from a women’s college in the East,and then went for a year to the University of Grenoble.She worked for a year in New York after returning from France,and then we were married.She once hung her diploma above the kitchen sink,but it was a short-lived joke and I don’t know where the diploma is now.Ethel is cheerful and adaptable,as well as gentle,and we both come from that enormous stratum of the middle class that is distinguished by its ability to recall better times.Lost money is so much a part of our lives that I am sometimes reminded of expatriates,of a group who have adapted themselves energetically to some alien soil but who are reminded,now and then,of the escarpments of their native coast.Because our lives are confined by my modest salary,the surface of Ethel’s life is easy to describe.