t when it comes to-day it's another thing. As
long as this crisis decently kept its distance, I could look at it with
an impartial eye; but now that it seems at hand, I find that, while my
reason is still acquiescent, my nerves are disposed to--excuse the
phrase--kick. I ask myself, what have I done nothing for, all my life,
and lived as a gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in
the possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure,
if I'm to come to this at last? And I find no satisfactory answer. I
say to myself that I might as well have yielded to the pressure all
round me, and gone to work, as Tom has."

Mrs. Corey looked at him forlornly, divining the core of real
repugnance that existed in his self-satire.

"I assure you, my dear," he continued, "that the recollection of what I
suffered from the Laphams at that dinner of yours is an anguish still.
It wasn't their behaviour,--they behaved well enough--or ill enough;
but their conversation was terrible. Mrs. Lapham's range was strictly
domestic; and when the Colonel got me in the library, he poured mineral
paint all over me, till I could have been safely warranted not to crack
or scale in any climate. I suppose we shall have to see a good deal of
them. They will probably come here every Sunday night to tea. It's a
perspective without a vanishing-point."

"It may not be so bad, after all," said his wife; and she suggested for
his consolation that he knew very little about the Laphams yet.

He assented to the fact. "I know very little about them, and about my
other fellow-beings. I dare say that I should like the Laphams better
if I knew them better. But in any case, I resign myself. And we must
keep in view the fact that this is mainly Tom's affair, and if his
affections have regulated it to his satisfaction, we must be content."

"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Corey. "And perhaps it won't turn out so badly.
It's a great comfort to know that you feel just as I do about it."

"I do," said her husband, "and more too."

It was she and her daughters who would be chiefly annoyed by the Lapham
connection; she knew that. But she had to begin to bear the burden by
helping her husband to bear his light share of it. To see him so
depressed dismayed her, and she might well have reproached him more
sharply than she did for showing so much indifference, when she was so
anxious, at first. But that would not have served any good end now.
S