The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck

answer. She washed her face and put on a fresh white cotton dress and went downstairs into the pantry and began to clean the silver.
    In Tom’s room Bettina sat with her hands in her face, listening and shaking her head again and again while he talked. He still had to rest in the afternoon and she read to him to help him rest. But today he had begun talking and talking.
    “Bettina, you’ve got to do what I say,” he insisted. “We can’t go on in the house like this. It’s horrible. It makes our—our relationship just like any—any—”
    He tried to pull her hands away from her face and she struggled against him and then yielded suddenly and sat looking at him, her face all bare and quivering. They knew each other so well now. She knew him to the bottom of his soul. In the long hours when she had been caring for him he had told her everything, every suffering, every loneliness, from the pain of a younger brother growing up in this house, Pierce always the stronger and the handsomer and the more brilliant and the more loved, and he always second, to the agonies of the prison camp and the slow starvation of body and soul in the war.
    And she had told him everything, too, and he knew what it was to be a woman like any other but inside a dark skin, and what it was to be a servant in this house and forever a servant somewhere. She told him of her mother and how her mother had taught Georgia and her to keep themselves apart and to cling always a little higher and nearer to the white people. But she did not tell him what her mother would have said now. Her mother had not known what it was to love a man so much that it no longer mattered that he was white. She had separated herself even from her mother because she loved Tom more than she loved herself.
    “So I want you to marry me, Bettina,” Tom was saying, “and you’ll be my true wife.”
    She was shaking her head again and he reached out his hands and took it between his palms and held it so that she could not shake it. “Yes, you will marry me,” he insisted. “The war was, fought so you could be free to marry me. It makes everything worth while to me—all I’ve been through. It makes me understand the good of suffering. We’re free to marry.”
    “No, we’re not,” she said stubbornly.
    They had been through all this before and would go through it again and she would always say no, over and over. For of course he couldn’t marry her. It would ruin him. He’d have to leave Malvern, and Pierce wouldn’t give him any money.
    “Why not?” Tom demanded. He knelt in front of her and held her hands so that she could not cover her face again.
    “The war didn’t change how people feel,” she said. “It’s how people feel that counts. They feel toward colored people just like they did before the war. Miss Lucie, she hasn’t changed. It doesn’t make any difference to her that Georgia and me get wages. She still thinks she owns us, I know.”
    “But she doesn’t own you,” Tom said impatiently. “It’s your fault if you keep feeling she does.”
    “I don’t feel she does,” Bettina said with patience. “What I’m saying is about her. You and she belong to the white people and I belong to the colored folks. She feels the colored folks still belong to the white people, and it don’t matter about the war or the law or anything so long as she feels that way and so long as you are white and I’m not. That feeling is going right on and the way she feels is the way she’s going to act, and she isn’t ever going to act like I was your wife, no matter if we marry, and if she don’t act that way, it won’t be that way, because she won’t let it.”
    “Good God, Bettina, Lucinda isn’t everybody!” Tom cried.
    “She’s like everybody,” Bettina said simply. She gazed at him sadly and smiled.
    But he would not accept the smile. “You don’t love me enough,” he complained.
    “I love you enough to have the baby and if you want more, I love