have rooms in London, and a
still, clean lodging somewhere among the lanes and fields. His ideals
expressed the homeliness of the man. On intellect he could not pride
himself; his education had been but of the 'commercial' order; he liked
to meditate rather than to read; questions of the day concerned him not
at all. A weak man, but of clean and kindly instincts. In mercantile
life he had succeeded by virtue of his intensely methodical habits--the
characteristic which made him suffer so from his wife's indolence,
incapacity, and vicious ill-humour.

Before his marriage he had thought of women as domestic beings. A wife
was the genius of home. He knew men who thanked their wives for all the
prosperity and content that they enjoyed. Others he knew who told quite
a different tale, but these surely were sorrowful exceptions. Nowadays
he saw the matter in a light of fuller experience. In his rank of life
married happiness was a rare thing, and the fault could generally be
traced to wives who had no sense of responsibility, no understanding of
household duties, no love of simple pleasures, no religion.

Yes, there was the point--no religion. Ada had grown up to regard
church-going as a sign of respectability, but without a shadow of
religious faith. Her incredible ignorance of the Bible story, of
Christian dogmas, often amazed him. Himself a believer, though careless
in the practice of forms, he was not disturbed by the modern tendency to
look for morals apart from faith; he had not the trouble of reflecting
that an ignorant woman is the last creature to be moralised by anything
but the Christian code; he saw straight into the fact--that there was
no hope of impressing Ada with ideas of goodness, truthfulness, purity,
simply because she recognised no moral authority.

For such minds no moral authority--merely as a moral authority--is
or can be valid. Such natures are ruled only by superstition--the
representative of reasoned faith in nobler beings. Rob them of their
superstition, and they perish amid all uncleanliness.

Thou shalt not lie--for God consumes a liar in the flames of hell! Ada
Peachey could lend ear to no admonition short of that. And, living when
she did, bred as she was, only a John Knox could have impressed her with
this menace--to be forgotten when the echoes of his voice had failed.

He did not enjoy his chop this evening. In the game of chess that
followed he played idly, with absent thoughts. And befo