Eventually, however, her reluctance to wound her husband and her solicitude for pride were overcome by an inner conviction that her love affair must move on to its next preordained stage. The possibilities of the subterranean courtship had been exhausted: it was time for the Announcement. She and the Young Man began to tell each other in a rather breathless and literary style that the Situation Was Impossible, and Things Couldn’t Go On This Way Any Longer. The ostensible meaning of these flurried laments was that under present conditions, they were not seeing enough of each other, and their hours together were too short and their periods of separation too dismal, that the whole business of deception had become morally distasteful to them.
Mary McCarthy, “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”, 1939
