train, too tired for anything but a
drowsy chat by the lingering embers of the library fire over the
festivities of the evening. You will open your broad hospitable door,
and enter an abode of chill and darkness. Your long-slumbering
household has let fires and lights go out; the thermometer in the
children's room stands at forty-five degrees, and there is nothing for
you to do but to descend to the cellar, arrayed in your wedding
garments, and try your unskilful best to coax into feeble circulation a
small, faintly throbbing heart of fire that yet glows far down in the
fire-pot's darksome internals. Then, when you have done what you can at
the unwonted and unwelcome task, you will see, by the feeble
candle-light, that your black dress-coat is gray with fine cinder dust,
and that your hands are red and raw from the handling of heavy
implements of toil. And then you will think of city home-comings after
the theatre or the ball; of the quiet half-hour in front of the dying
cannel; of the short cigar and the little nightcap, and of the gentle
passage bedward, so easy in that warm and slumberous atmosphere that you
hardly know how you have passed from weariness to peaceful dreams. And
there will come to your spirit a sudden passion of humiliation and
revolt that will make you say to yourself: This is the end!

[Illustration]

But you know perfectly well that it is _not_ the end, however ardently
you may wish that it was. There still remain two years of your
un-subletable lease; and you set yourself, courageously and firmly, to
serving out the rest of your time. You resolve, as a good prisoner, to
make the best of it. You set to work to apply a little plain
common-sense to the problem of the furnace--and find it not so difficult
of partial solution after all. You face your other local troubles with a
determination to minimize them at least. You resolve to check your too
open expressions of dissatisfaction with the life you are leading. You
hardly know why you do this, but you have, half-unconsciously, read a
gentle hint in the faces of your neighbors; and as you see those kindly
faces gathering oftener and oftener about your fire as the winter nights
go on, it may, perhaps, dawn upon your mind that the existence you were
so quick to condemn has grown dear to some of them.

But, whether you know it or not, that second year in the suburban house
is a crisis and turning-point in your life, for it will make of you
either a c