nd then went to the office to ask what had become of her.

The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk. "Oh, I
guess she's round in my wife's room, Mr. Landa. She always likes to see
Clementina, and I guess they all do. She's a so't o' pet amongst 'em."

"No hurry," said Lander, "I guess my wife ain't quite ready for her
yet."

"Well, she'll be right out, in a minute or so," said the landlord.

The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on
the veranda and look at the landscape while he waited. It was one of the
loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of
an abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of
the valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped
with folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops. But Lander was
tired of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put' up
with them, in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same
resignation that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars
and sleepers, and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables. He was chained to
the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for
its impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife's disappointments
from it. He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an
order of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though
there were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of
its justice. He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was
master in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he
was in some sort of authority. He perceived that now he was a slave to
the wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he
was never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she
asked. He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from
him, and he had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by
her whims, who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object.
He felt no rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender
regard for him, and that she believed she was considering him first in
her most selfish arrangements. He always hoped that sometime she would
get tired of her restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in
some stated place; and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind
of business again. Till this should happen he waited