# Confessions of a Wife/Chapter 3

III
November the third.
There is no doubt about it that happiness is an occupation. When I see how long it is since I have added anything worth adding to the Accepted Manuscript, and when I try to define to myself what it is that gives me such a sense of being busy all the time, I find that it is scarcely more than the existence of joy. What I have lost is the leisure of loneliness; what I have gained is the avocation of love.
They teach us that only in heaven can we expect to know happiness. It is not true! I summon mine—a singing witness in the courts of life. I fling down the glove of joy, a challenge to such dismal doctrine. There are whole weeks when I live in poems, I breathe in song. There are entire days when I float in color, and seem to be set free in space, as a bird is, knowing the earth and loving it, but citizen of the skies and homing to them. I fall asleep as if I were a sunset, and I wake as if I were a sunrise, so near ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/110 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/111 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/112 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/113 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/114 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/115 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/116 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/117 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/118 ​ "I WAS HALF STARTLED AT THE FIGURE I SAW THERE."
​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/121 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/122 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/123 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/124 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/125 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/126 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/127 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/128 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/129 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/130 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/131 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/132 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/133 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/134 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/135 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/136 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/137 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/138 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/139 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/140 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/141 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/142 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/143 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/144 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/145 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/146 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/147 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/148 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/149 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/150 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/151 ​Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/152 ​thing in earth or heaven but you—not of the baby at all, only you, you.
"Stay by me when you come, Darling! Don't let them persuade you that it will harm me. It will save me, and it is the only thing that will. They thought that I should die, but I could not die when you were so far away. That would have been impossible.
Dana, Dana, I live, and I love you. For I am
"The Mother of your Child."
August the thirtieth.
This is the first time I have been allowed to write (to amuse myself), and I am limited to eight lines. "Being happy," I remember Hawthorne said, "he had no questions to put." Being happy because my husband gives me every moment that he can beg or steal from time, being happy because he is so happy, because he blinds me with tenderness, I have no letters to write. Instead, I record the fact that my daughter is two weeks old to-day, and that Job is so jealous of her that we cannot keep them in the same room. I think he is planning definite hostilities. Job finds her more objectionable than David and Dora.