From the very first night J.'s world was shattered. We need not enter into details in this matter, but a woman of this type needs finesse in the initiation into marriage more than at any other time. Cave-man style outraged her every fiber, and the man was dumbfounded at her reaction. Though he tried to make amends his very effort and lack of understanding complicated matters.
Aside from this matter, which in the course of time became adjusted, so that though she rebelled desire arose in her, she found herself at odds with her husband's tastes and conduct in little things. Though his table manners were good enough, the gusto of his eating annoyed her and took away her own appetite. When they went to a play together the coarse jokes and the plainly sensuous aroused his enthusiasm. He lacked subtlety and could not understand the "finer" things of life. As he grew settled in matrimony, which he enjoyed in spite of her nerves (which he took for granted as like a woman), he grew stouter and this irritated and jarred her.
She finally realized she no longer loved him. It is doubtful if she realized this before the birth of her first and only child. She lacked maternal feeling and rebelled with a bitter rebellion against the distortion of her figure that came with the pregnancy. The nursing ordered by the doctor and expected by all around her nearly drove her "wild", she said, for she felt like a "cow", a "female." Indeed she reacted bitterly against the femaleness that marriage forced on her and hated the essential maleness of her husband. Her emotional reaction against nursing took away her milk, and finally the disgusted family doctor ordered the baby weaned and he was turned over to a servant.
She went back to her own life, determined to become a housewife, to see if she could not love her husband and her home. But everything he did irritated her, and everything in the house made her feel as in a "luxurious cage." Yet she was by no means a feminist; she detested "noisy suffragettes", thought women doctors and lawyers ridiculous, and had been brought up to regard marriage as indissoluble.
Gradually out of the conflict, the chilling fear that she had made a mistake which could not be rectified, the constant irritation and annoyances, the revolt against her own sex feeling and her life situation, arose the neurosis. It took the form mainly of sudden unaccountable fears with faint dizzy feelings. The family physician on the aside told me that it was "just a case of a damn fool woman with everybody too good to her."