which he'd have liked
to pretend didn't matter much, but an acknowledgment of defeat to
himself. What he had been trying to do ever since his return from that
maddening talk with Rose in Dubuque, had been just to sit tight; to go
on living a day at a time; to take the future in as small doses as he
could manage.

Had he been the sort of person who finds comfort in mottoes, he'd have
laid in a stock, such as, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof";
"Holdfast is the only dog"; "Don't cross your bridges until you come to
them." As the period between the night of his discovery of Rose on the
Globe stage and the day of his return from Dubuque receded, and as the
fierceness of the pain of it died away again (because such pains do die
away. They can't keep screwed up into an ecstasy of torment forever) the
part he'd played in the events of it, seemed to him less and less worthy
of the sort of man he'd always considered himself to be; a
self-controlled, self-disciplined adult. He'd acted for a while there,
with the savage egotism of a distracted boy; thrown his dignity to the
winds; made a holy show of himself. Well, that period was over at all
events. Whatever the future might confront him with, he could promise
himself, he thought, to keep his head.

But for a while, he didn't want to be confronted with anything, let
alone to start anything; not until he could get his breath; not until he
had time to think everything out; discover, if possible, where the whole
miserable trouble had begun. He'd go back to the beginning, sometime,
and try to work it all out. It went, probably, a long way back of the
night when that hasty speech of his about not jeopardizing the
children's lives to gratify his wife's whims had set the match to her
resolution to leave him and the babies and live a life for herself.

But, though he told himself every day that he must begin ordering his
old memories, analyzing them, in search of the clue, he didn't begin the
process. Spiritually, he just held himself rigidly still. He might have
compared himself to a man standing off a pack of wolves, knowing that
his slightest move would precipitate a rush upon him. Or, perhaps more
nearly, to a man just recovering consciousness after an accident, afraid
to stir lest the smallest movement might reveal more serious injuries
than he suspected.

His mind had never worked so brilliantly as it was working now. The
problems involved in his clients' affairs we