st ornate smoking apparatus, with the understanding that
it shall never be used.

It is after dinner that reflection comes; and with it comes a touch of
sorrowful wonder. Jack bears himself with great equanimity in his new
condition; but it is apparent, nevertheless, that he has changed from
what you knew him. In the first place, he has built up a comprehensive
system of domestic serfdom to which he cheerfully submits. He glories in
his enslavement; he rattles his chains. He actually boasts of the habit
he has acquired of dropping in at the grocer's every morning on his way
to the office. When it is the maid's day out, Jack insists on helping
with the dishes and he tells you with pride that, given plenty of hot
water, there is nothing in that line which he would hesitate to
undertake. He makes it a point to visit Washington Market at least twice
a week, and he comes home with cuts, joints, steaks, rounds, poultry,
fish, game, and fruits in dazzling variety. He carries these things
conspicuously in the Subway. And Jack's wife is appreciative of his kind
intentions, and lets him bring, from long distances, meats which she can
purchase at several cents a pound less from her butcher two blocks away.

The passion for acquiring food commodities is only one phase of Jack's
new character. You begin to see now that all these years you have never
suspected what capacities for home-building he had in him. In the
presence of any kind of article offered for sale his overmastering
passion is to buy the thing and take it home. Instinct apparently
impels him to store up quite useless supplies against a future
emergency. He haunts hardware stores, he rummages in antique furniture
shops, and you may see him any day during the lunch hour flattening his
nose against windowfuls of copper and brass ware. He buys patent hammers
by the quarter dozen, as well as nails, tacks, screws, bolts, casters,
brackets, and curtain poles. He brings home Japanese vases from the
auction rooms. One day he acquired a step-ladder; it came by wagon
because they refused to let him take it into the Subway.

And Jack's wife acquiesces in his self-imposed servitude. She does not
demand it; she is even a good deal incommoded by it. But her woman's
instinct tells her that the thing is a disease, which a man must catch,
like the measles. Until the husband's passion for home-building quiets
down, she is content to accept the unnatural situation; she is even
proud to