me again. They wanted us as we were--house,
food, trappings--the whole layout. They meant well enough. They simply
had to have certain things. If we changed our scale of living we should
lose the acquaintance of these people, and we should have nobody in
their place.

We had grown into a highly complicated system, in which we had a settled
orbit. This orbit was not susceptible of change unless we were willing
to turn everything topsy-turvy. Everybody would suppose we had lost our
money. And, not being brilliant or clever people, who paid their way as
they went by making themselves lively and attractive, it would be
assumed that we could not keep up our end; so we should be gradually
left out.

I said to myself that I ought not to care--that being left out was what
I wanted; but, all the same, I knew I did care. You cannot tear yourself
up by the roots at fifty unless you are prepared to go to a far country.
I was not prepared to do that at a moment's notice. I, too, was used to
a whole lot of things--was solidly imbedded in them.

My very house was an overwhelming incubus. I was like a miserable snail,
forever lugging my house round on my back--unable to shake it off. A
change in our mode of life would not necessarily in itself bring my
children any nearer to me; it would, on the contrary, probably
antagonize them. I had sowed the seed and I was reaping the harvest. My
professional life I could not alter. I had my private clients--my
regular business. Besides there was no reason for altering it. I
conducted it honorably and well enough.

Yet the calm consideration of those very difficulties in the end only
demonstrated the clearer to me the perilous state in which I was. The
deeper the bog, the more my spirit writhed to be free. Better, I
thought, to die struggling than gradually to sink down and be suffocated
beneath the mire of apathy and self-indulgence.

Hastings' little home--or something--had wrought a change in me. I had
gone through some sort of genuine emotional experience. It seemed
impossible to reform my mode of life and thought, but it was equally
incredible that I should fall back into my old indifference. Sitting
there alone in my chamber I felt like a man in a nightmare, who would
give his all to be able to rise, yet whose limbs were immovable, held by
some subtle and cruel power. I had read in novels about men agonized by
remorse and indecision. I now experienced those sensations myself. I
discove