The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

humanity. His unhappiness she made her happiness,
and she immediately saw what was behind an
occasional show of gentleness and affection. Even
farmers were taking their wives abroad these days.
Given Honda’s affluence, his proposal was a very
modest one. Her refusal was extraordinarily stubborn.
Sometimes she even shouted at him.
“What are London and Venice and Paris to me? I’m
an old woman, and what do you expect me to get out
of it, being dragged around to places like that?”
A young Honda would probably have been put off
by such brusqueness; but the old Honda wondered
whether his proposal to take his wife abroad had
really had in it any sort of affectionate solicitude at all.
Rié had become accustomed to look with suspicion
upon evidences of affection, and Honda had fallen
into a similar habit. Perhaps his travel plans had
embodied an urge to play the role of the virtuous
husband. Making everything its opposite, making his
wife’s resistance into womanly diffidence, her
coldness into concealed ardor, he had sought
evidence of his own benevolence. And perhaps he
wanted to turn the whole voyage into a celebration
marking the passage of some stage or other in life.
Rié immediately picked out the vulgar motives behind
his fabricated benevolence. She pleaded illness, and