irit in its husk of swine. His agony
increased.

"Where shall I drift if I go on," he said, "playing the sleek magistrate
and family head, and loving to slip away in the dark, like negroes
hunting coons by night? What is escaping discovery to the increasing
degradation of my own sanctuary, my created spirit? Can I find the way I
have wandered down and retrace my steps? There is but little of life
left me to do it in, but by God's help I will try! Yes, this golden
Sabbath I will do something to begin. What shall it be?"

He put on his hat, and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist
meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense
of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may
grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is
the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church,
and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship
to another now. If I go to church this morning it must be to our own. Is
there any excuse but cowardice for not going?"

He looked into his debtor nature, to see what he owed to anybody, that
might be owned and settled this day.

Slowly and almost to his dislike there arose an obligation to his
wife--the obligation of love he was defrauding her of, if, indeed, he
loved her at all with the ardor of old times.

She had fretted his passion away in little sticklings for little
proprieties, and narrowing understanding, and subservience to effeminate
social traditions. She jarred upon the health of his intellect with her
unsympathetic refinements and pitiful uncharities, and fear of all
catholicity. She was gentility itself, without the spark of nature, and
believing that she inhabited the castle towers of exclusiveness and
social righteousness, she had made his home the donjon-keep of his
knighthood, at once the loftiest domestic apartment and the prison.

Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in
Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his
waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the
distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance,
her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and
air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.

"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not
grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set