Margaret Deland's The Vehement Flame (1922) opens with a newly married couple in a June landscape, the husband Maurice Curtis lying in grass at his wife Eleanor's feet. The narrator immediately undercuts the pastoral idyll: the boy's love is 'without apprehension or humor,' while the woman's love 'had doubt in its exultation.' This asymmetry—the husband's heedless joy versus the wife's anxious devotion—shapes the early chapters. The epigraph from Song of Solomon, 'jealousy is cruel as the grave,' signals a central tension that the catalog subjects (love stories, social life and customs) only partly capture. The excerpts reveal a domestic drama of mismatched expectations, not a straightforward romance.

A Marriage Measured in Minutes and Miles

The first excerpt compresses the entire marriage into a single afternoon. Maurice counts the minutes—'exactly fifty-four minutes'—and declares he could die happy. Eleanor, by contrast, is silent, kissing his hair without words. The narrator's observation that 'the boy took out his watch' is a small but telling detail: time is already a presence in their union. Later, on a fishing trip, Maurice counts 'the hours until he could get back to Mercer,' and Eleanor, in 'flopping pink slippers,' trails after him. The physical distance between them—he 'sheering off to the other side of the road'—mirrors the emotional gap. Deland uses concrete gestures (a watch, a yawn, a shoulder avoided) to dramatize the strain, rather than abstract declarations.

The Weight of a Word: 'Darling' as a Tether

In the excerpts, Eleanor addresses Maurice as 'Darling' three times, each in a bid to redirect his attention: 'Darling, I believe I'd like to go up to the cabin to-day'; 'Darling, let's play solitaire?'; 'Darling, let's walk?' The word becomes a plea, not an endearment. Maurice responds with 'listlessly,' 'briefly,' or a yawn. The narrator notes that Eleanor's 'anxious ponderings of household expenses' fail to amuse him, while he thinks 'of the expenses of another household.' This parallel construction—her domestic worries, his secret concerns—hints at a rift the catalog's 'love stories' label does not prepare for. The novel's title, drawn from the Song of Solomon, suggests passion, but the excerpts show a love already cooling into obligation.

Silence and the Unspoken

Deland's dialogue is punctuated by what is not said. When Maurice agrees not to go fishing, he says only 'All right; if you want to.' Eleanor's response is internal: 'she did her best to amuse him.' The narrator reports that 'his silence confessed an irritation which she felt but could not understand.' Later, 'the helpless tears stood in her eyes.' The excerpts avoid melodrama; instead, they accumulate small failures of communication. The fishing trip scene ends with Eleanor and Maurice walking 'trudged off' in silence, the word 'trudged' undercutting any romance. The catalog subject 'United States — Social life and customs — 20th century' finds its evidence here: in the social rituals of a country vacation, a husband's boredom, and a wife's unspoken grief.

Readers approaching The Vehement Flame should attend to the gap between what characters say and what the narrator reveals. Deland's prose rewards close attention to gesture—a watch checked, a shoulder avoided, a slipper flopping—as much as to dialogue. The excerpts offer no resolution, only a pattern of yearning and withdrawal. The novel's length (over 128,000 words) suggests this pattern will be sustained and complicated, not resolved quickly.