When the woman has once taken flight, or is hesitating before taking her flight, in the Eighth Year, it is an almost hopeless business for the husband to call her back. Whenever she is called back, it is by some outside influence, beyond his sphere of influence, by some sudden accident, by some catastrophe involving both of them, or by some severe moral shock, shaking the foundations of their little home like an earthquake. There are cases in which the woman has been called back by the sudden smash-up of her husband’s business, by financial ruin. In his social ladder-climbing he is too rash. One of the rungs of the ladder breaks beneath his feet and he comes toppling down. Owing to this deadly competition of modern life, he loses his “job.” It is given to a younger or better man, or to a man with a stronger social pull. He comes home one day with a white face, trembling, horribly scared, afraid to break the news to a woman who has not been helpful to him of late, and of whose sympathy he is no longer sure. He believes that this misfortune is the last straw which will break their strained relations. He sees the great tragedy looming ahead, hearing down upon him. But, curiously enough, this apparent disaster is the salvation of both of them. The despair of her husband calls to the woman’s loyalty. All her grievances against this man are suddenly swallowed up in the precipice which has opened beneath his feet. All her antagonism is broken down and dissolved into pity. Her self-pride is slain by this man’s abasement. His weakness, his need of help, his panic-stricken heart cry to her. After all their drifting apart, their indifference to each other, their independence, he wants her again. He wants her as a helpmeet. He wants any courage she can give him, any wisdom. And she is glad to be wanted. She stretches out her hands to him. They clasp each other, and there is no longer a gulf beneath their feet; misfortune has built a bridge across the gulf which divided them. More than that, all the little meannesses of their life, all the petty selfishness of their days, all the little futile things over which they have wrangled and jangled are thrust on one side, and are seen in their right perspective. The things that matter, the only things that matter, are seen, perhaps, for the first time, clearly, in a bright light, now that they are face to face with stem realities. The shock throws them off their pedestals of conceit, of self-consciousness, of pretence. They stand on solid ground. The shock has broken the masks behind which they hid themselves. It has broken the hard crust about their hearts. It has shattered the idol which they worshipped, the idol of the great god Snob.

And so they stare into each other’s soul, and take hands again like little children, abandoned by the Wicked Uncles of life, and they grope their way back to primitive things, and begin the journey again. They have found out that this new comradeship is better even than the old romantic love of their courting days. They have discovered something of the great secret of life. They are humbled. They make new pledges to each other, pick up the broken pieces of their hopes and dreams and fit them together again in a new and sounder scheme. This time, in some cases, they do not leave the baby out of the business. The wife becomes a mother, and the child chases away all the ghosts which haunted her in the Eighth Year. She no longer wants to take flight. She has been called back.

It is nearly always some accident like this which calls the wife back, some sudden, startling change in the situation, caused by outside influences, or by the hand of Fate. Sometimes it is an illness which overtakes the husband or wife. Holding hands by the bedside, they stare into the face of Death, and again the trivialities of life, the pettiness of their previous desires, the folly of their selfishness, the stupidity of their little snobdom, are revealed by the whisperings of Death, and by its warnings. The truth of things stalks into the bedroom where the husband, or the wife, lies sleeping on the borderland. About the sick bed the weeping woman makes new vows, tears wash out her vanity, her self-conceit. Or, kneeling by the side of the woman whose transparent hand he clasps above the coverlet, the husband listens to the little voice within his conscience, and understands, with a great heartache, the pitiful meaning of the domestic strife which seemed to have killed his love for the woman for whose life now he makes a passionate cry. In the period of convalescence, after Death has stolen away, when life smiles again through the open windows, that man and woman get back to sanity and to wisdom beyond that of common-sense. They begin again with new ideals. Perhaps in a little while one of the rooms becomes a nursery. They get back to the joy of youth, once more the woman has been called back.

If none of these “accidents” happen, if some great influence like this does not thrust its way into the lives of this husband and wife during the crisis of the Eighth Year, if the woman is not caught up by some great enthusiasm, or if she can find no work for the idle hands to do, giving her new and absorbing interests to satisfy her heart and brain, then the Eighth Year is a fatal year, and the President of the Divorce Court has a new case added to his list, or the family records of the country chronicle another separation, or another woman goes to prison for arson or bomb-throwing. Because the laws of psychology are not so erratic as the world imagines. They work out on definite lines. Certain psychological forces having been set in motion, they lead inevitably to certain results. When once a woman has lost her interest in her home and husband, when she has become bored with herself, when she has a morbid craving for excitement and adventures, when she has become peevish and listless and hungry-hearted, she cannot remain in this condition. Those forces within her are tremendously powerful. They must find some outlet. They must reach a definite time of crisis when things have got to happen. These vague yearnings must be satisfied, somehow, anyhow. The emptiness of her heart must be filled by something or other. She will search round with wondering, wistful eyes, more desperate day by day, until she finds the thing, however evil it may be, however dangerous. She must still that throbbing brain of hers, even if she has to take drugs to do so. In spite of all the poison laws, she will find some kind of poison, some subtle and insidious drug to give her temporary cure, a period of vitality, a thrill of excitement, a glittering dream or two, a relief from the dulness which is pressing down upon her with leaden weights. She knows the penalty which follows this drug-taking—the awful reaction, the deadly lethargy that follows, the nervous crises, the loss of will-power, but she is prepared to pay the price because for a little while she gets peace, and artificial life. The family doctors know the prevalence of those drug-taking habits. They know the cause of them, they have watched the pitiful drama of these women’s lives. But they can do nothing to cut out the cause. Not even the surgeon’s knife can do that; their warnings fall on deaf ears, or are answered by a hysterical laugh.

As I have shown, there are other forms of drug-taking not less dangerous in their moral effects. If the woman does not go to the chemist’s shop, she goes to the darkened room of the clairvoyant and the crystal-gazer, or to the spiritualistic sÉance, or to the man who hides his time until the crisis of the Eighth Year delivers the woman into his hands.

Here, then, frankly and in detail, I have set out the meaning of this dangerous year of married life, and have endeavored, honestly, to analyze all the social and psychological forces which go to make that crisis. It is, in some measure, a study of our modern conditions of life as they prevail among the middle-classes, so that the problem is not abnormal, but is present, to some extent, in hundreds of thousands of small households to-day. All the tendencies of the time, all the revolutionary ideas that are in the very air we breathe, all this modern spirit of revolt against disagreeable duties, and drudgery, and discipline, the decay of religious authority, the sapping of spiritual faith, the striving for social success, the cult of snobbishness, the new creed of selfishness which ignores the future of the race and demands a good time here and now, the lack of any ideals larger than private interests and personal comforts, the ignorance of men and women who call themselves intellectual, the nervous irritability of husbands and wives who live up to the last penny of their incomes, above all the childlessness of these women who live in small flats and suburban villas, and their utter laziness, all those signs and symptoms of our social sickness lead up, inevitably, and with fatal logic, to the tragedy of the Eighth Year.