se circumstances with an unliterary man who, whilst
clinging to leisure and having no inclination to forfeit an hour of it
in a day, yet was bored extremely from lack of occupation and
resource.

The horrid intimacy of urban life for all poor and needy people must
be very wearing. Its lack of privacy is most distressing. But this
becomes enormously aggravated, of course, where the bread-winner must
do his work within the walls of the cramped home. And that aggravation
of difficulties is multiplied tenfold if the bread-winner's work must
not only be done inside the home, but must also be the product of
sustained and concentrated thought; if it be work of that sort which
lends itself readily to interruption, in which a moment's break may
mean an hour's delay, and an hour's delay may mean for the worker a
fit of hot disgust in which his unfinished task finds its way into
fireplace or waste-paper basket.

The year which I gave to trying to make a success of our married life
appears to me in the retrospect as a monotonous series of abortive
honeymoons, separated by interludes of terribly hard and unfruitful
labour for me (more exhausting than any long sustained working effort
I ever made), throughout which, out of respect for my praiseworthy
resolutions as a would-be good husband, my exacerbated temper was
cloaked in a sort of waxy fixative, even as some men discipline their
moustaches. I see myself in these periods as a man acutely tired,
miserably conscious of the barren nature of his exhausting daily toil,
and wearing a horrible set smile of connubial amiability; the sort of
smile which, in time, produces a kind of facial cramp.

My wife, poor little soul, was not, I think, burdened by any self-imposed
task touching the set of her lips. And it may be this was so
much the worse for her. In the absence of any recognised duty she knew
of no distraction save her visits to her mother, regarding which she
felt a certain furtiveness to be necessary, by reason of my ill-judged
show of impatience in this matter, and my refusal to open my own arms
to the woman who, for years, had made Fanny's life a burden to her.

'Confound it!' I thought. 'My part was to release her from this
harridan's clutches, not to go round and mix tears and gin with the
woman.'

But I was wrong. I should have gone much farther, or not near so far.
(How often that has been my fault!) Either I should have prevented
those visits, or sterilised them by ta