he hails the arrival of an
unexpected interrupting friend! With what easement he decides that he
may lawfully put off some task till the morrow! Let him hear a band or
a fire-engine in the street, and he will go to the window with the
eagerness of a child or of a girl-clerk. If he were working at golf
the bands of all the regiments of Hohenzollern would not make him turn
his head, nor the multitudinous blazing of fireproof skyscrapers. No!
Let us be honest. Business constitutes the steepest, roughest league
of the appointed path. Were it otherwise, business would not be
universally regarded as a means to an end.

Moreover, when the plain man gets home again, does his wife's face say
to him: "I know that your real life is now over for the day, and I
regret for your sake that you have to return here. I know that the
powerful interest of your life is gone. But I am glad that you have
had five, six, seven, or eight hours of passionate pleasure"? Not a
bit! His wife's face says to him: "I commiserate with you on all that
you have been through. It is a great shame that you should be
compelled to toil thus painfully. But I will try to make it up to you.
I will soothe you. I will humour you. Forget anxiety and fatigue in my
smiles." She does not fetch his comfortable slippers for him, partly
because, in this century, wives do not do such things, and partly
because comfortable slippers are no longer worn. But she does the
equivalent--whatever the equivalent may happen to be in that
particular household. And he expects the commiseration and the solace
in her face. He would be very hurt did he not find it there.

And even yet he is not relaxed. Even yet the appointed path stretches
inexorably in front, and he cannot wander. For now he feels the cogs
and cranks of the highly complex domestic machine. At breakfast he
declined to hear them; they were shut off from him; he was too busy to
be bothered with them. At evening he must be bothered with them. Was
it not he who created the machine? He discovers, often to his
astonishment, that his wife has an existence of her own, full of
factors foreign to him, and he has to project himself, not only into
his wife's existence, but into the existences of other minor
personages. His daughter, for example, will persist in growing up. Not
for a single day will she pause. He arrives one night and perceives
that she is a woman and that he must treat her as a woman. He had not
bargained for this.