TheRefleclionsof-a Married A\an ttt^ Roberi Grant ®0mrtl Uttivmitg pibtMg THE GIFT OF ..!?.J^xSJUih formula ever on the lips of the married woman with social proclivities. The other woman's husband to whom it is addressed in- stinctively replies that he will make a point of doing so, but in nine eases out of ten never goes. Verily, if a married man were to try to sip afternoon tea at every hearth where he is confidingly invited to make himself at home, he would soon be bankrupt in days and hours. To the married man who is busy down-town all day, an afternoon call is a serious circum- stance. It involves feverish hurry, if not the expense of a cab, in order to get up-town and make himself presentable before it is too late. You bound up-stairs two steps at a time, change your shirt, boots, and necktie, slip on a black coat, and deaf to domestic outcries, bolt from the house, and at about a quarter 68 TEE REFLECTIONS OF past five halt, perspiring and breathless, at the desired threshold. You find your hostess in an artistic drawing- room, where a freshly-kiudled wood-fire sput- ters invitingly and the waning daylight has given place to a pink or safiron atmosphere provided by a trio of lamps with festive shades. Tou are likely, if the house-maid be careless, to detect a faint aroma of kerosene, otherwise of Ariolets. A posse of spotted chiaa dragons gapes at you from the fireplace, and an array of small silver ornaments twinkles at you from low plush tables ; you catch a general glint of vellum-bound volumes and photographs of wan-eyed women in queer frames, and sundry sepia etchings on the wall, and a variety of brilliant-hued cushions disguising the discom- fort of numerous quaintly-fashioned chairs and sofas, and forth from her shadowy corner the mistress of it all, blithe, siauous, and gracious, stretches a welcoming hand and waves you to a seat with soft-toned greetiags. You recite the current news of the hour while the mechanical, mysterious man-servant establishes the burnished urn and the Japan- ese tray resplendent with the daintiest silver- ware and cups and saucers. In silence you A MARRIED MAN 69 watch your hostess saturate the tea-leaves with sphinx-like preoccupation, as though she were performing a sacrificial rite, and it is only when she has left the chemical process to fulfil itself and has dropped back among her cush- ions that you feel words to be seemly. And then you talk, you and she also — talk of any- thing and everything, of the book of verses close to her hand, of the ethical considerations governing divorce, of the latest phase in art, of Christian S3ience, of Heine, of the sweating system, or of the Australian ballot law. The conversation flows with the quiet intensity of a river, the battledoor and shuttlecock of ar- gument proceeds with delightful agility on either part. You marvel at your own fluency almost as much as at the felicity and clever- ness of her diction, and you realize that you are being spurred to put your best foot for- ward. You are conservative, naturally, being a lawyer, and as a man of the world inclined to be sceptical and materialistic ; she, on the other hand, leans toward ideality, or truth, as she delights to caU it, and she rebuts the blows of your cold logic with fervid syllogisms. A Christian worshipper, she yet has a warm cor- ner in her heart for Buddha ; an allopath and, 70 TEE REFLECTIONS OV in her own words, a humble devotee of science, she smiles like a seraph at mysterious cures ; and her interrogative eyebrows perpetually fend from satire the splayfoot of the impressionist. How deftly she remembers your prejudices in respect to cream and sugar when the chemi- cal process is complete and she proffers you a cup of tea ! A man's wife may live to be a hundred and yet never be certain whether he takes one lump or two ; women like Mrs. Guy Sloane need to be told but once. And while you dally with yoiir cup and munch a delicate shred of bread and butter, or a biscuit of eva- nescent and fairy-like thinness, she pursues her argument with a glib and wistful intensity which holds you in its thrall until another vis- itor arrives or the tones of the clock warn you that your dinner hour is approaching. " You will come again soon," she says wist- fully, as you bow low over her outstretched hand, and you murmur that you assuredly will, and as you scurry home, so as to be in time for the family mutton, the odor of violets is in your nostrils and you shrink from ugliness and squalor (pronounced squalor) with the sensi- tiveness of one whose aesthetic instincts have been gloriously catered to. A MABRIED MAN 71 So it is tlie first time and the second, and so it is substantially the fifth, and then there comes a change ; a gradual one, but nevertheless a change, and on her part, not on yours. You have found each recurring call as enjoyable, if not more so, than the last, and have come to regard these five o'clock meetings as one of your most agreeable diversions from workaday routine. She has lent you books bristling with modem thought, and you have read them, and you have bent the full blast of your intel- ligence on the tenement-house problem and the development of the stage, and learned to distiuguish between an artist and a painter, so that you are a perfect arsenal of eager, com- bative opinions on these several subjects. Yet you are asking yourseK why it is that, though you are far better equipped and consequently a much more interesting companion' than at first, she manifests a certain listlessness while you are talking, and instead of appreciating and endeavoring to answer your subtleties shows a disposition to avoid discussion. She wears, too, an air of gentle, cold melancholy, as though she were disappointed in you, which is puzzling and disconcerting. You interrogate your inner consciousness as to how you can 72 THE REFLECTIONS OF possibly have offended her, and you remain nonplussed. It seems to you as she sits toy- ing with her teaspoon, that her eyebrows have become almost scornful. What is the matter? "What have you done ? But for Josephine the cause might never have been revealed to me in my own particular experience with Mrs. Guy Sloane. As it was, I remained completely mystified until our in- timacy had faded into commonplace acquaint- ance. There was never any breach between us, never a disagreeable word ; yet little by little the emanation of her chilling, listless dis- dain reduced me to wondering silence. Con- scious that my conversation was listened to with perfunctory politeness, I became tongue- tied and moody in my turn, and so far ill at ease that on one occasion I devoured involun- tarily the entire supply of thin shreds of bread and butter, whereupon she summoned the mys- terious man-servant, and with a haughty, piti- ful smile bade him bring a fresh relay. There was a perpetual sadness in her expression which told me more plainly at each successive meet- ing that I had been weighed in the balance and been found wanting, a sadness which seemed to imply that she had put her trust in me in A MARRIED MAN 73 vain. At one of our last interviews, when she was more than commonly plaintive, and I was beating my brain to discover the cause of my unworthiness, I asked myself the question, if it could possibly be that she expected me to clasp her in my arms and fold her to my breast after the manner of M. de Camors and other worthies ; but I dismissed the idea as out of the question. Had it been Mrs. Willoughby Walton — ahsit omen; but it was sacrilege even to formulate such an idea concerning Mrs. Guy Sloane. " She would have screamed if you had, and there would have been a terrible scene, and' she would never have spoken to you again," said Josephine, when I laid the matter before her. " Still she would have forgiven you in her secret soul, which she will never do now," she added, with gentle jubilation, " What have I done ? " " Done ? You have committed, Fred, the unpardonable sin — to a woman — of seeming more interested in the subjects you were dis- cussing than in her, of forgetting her in your enthusiasm for a notion or idea." " But she was interested in the subjects her- self at first, fully as much as I. It was hei enthusiasm which aroused mine." 74 THE BBFLEGTIONS OF " Poor simple innocent ! Are you so guile- less as to suppose that a woman like Mrs. Sloane is content to have a man call upon her once or twice a week simply to discuss sub- jects? I grant you that she is interested in subjects, or rather that she interests herself in them, but they are by themselves merely so many husks in her intention. I can see you, Fred, completely engrossed in the considera- tion of some grand problem to the utter for- getfulness of everything else, and under the goad of genuine conviction pouring out a tor- rent of speech with the impetus of a steam fire- engine ; lean see you, dear, I can see you. And you flattered yourself, I dare say, that your logic was unanswerable and that your argument was knocking hers into a cocked hat, and you never dreamed for one moment of the cold shower-bath effect which your magnificent harangue was having upon her sensibilities and hopes." " Hopes of what ? " " Don't interrupt me, Fred, and don't misun- derstand me. Mrs. Sloane is a woman whose good name is above suspicion. As I said to you a minute ago, if you had kissed her she would have screamed and been mortally A MARRIED MAN 75 offended; an avowal of passion would have shocked and distressed her irreparably, for she never harbored such an expectation in her life. But, on the other hand, in admitting you to her intim'&cy she had definite hopes which you have failed to satisfy ; hopes of sympathy, of mutual confidences as to your and her most secret and personal affairs, of inducing you to substitute her for me as an intellectual com- panion so far as was compatible with entire respectability; all of which might have been extremely harassing for poor me had you not been the delightful, obtuse, true-to-your-own- dsar-wif ey darling that you are. In short, Fred, she asked for bread and you gave her a stone." " In other words, she expected me to fall in love with her ? " " Call it ' sympathize with her ; ' ' love ' is such a strenuous term. She expects the in- dividuals who belong to her collection to be sympathetic, that's all. She and her husband, though they preserve outward appearances, agreed to disagree long ago, as everyone knows ; and accordingly she is lonely, poor soul (what would she say if she knew that in- significant little I had ventured to pity her !), and in her loneliness she reaches out after 76 THE REFLECTIONS OF other women's husbands for sympathy, some- what as the cuckoo usurps the nests and sucks the eggs of other birds. She's a sort of social cuckoo, Fred, but of the most refined, fastidi- ous delicate kind. She would be incapable of creating a scandal in the heinous sense of the term, and had she succeeded in getting you into her clutches your duties would not have been severe. You would have been expected to divine that she was unhappy — she would have given you to understand it in a variety of ways without ever condescending to tell you so in e-xpress words — and to imply by your manner that did not other ties on her side and yours forbid, matters might be very different. You would have been expected to hint at my little failings without actually mentioning them, so as to give her an opportunity to rhapsodize exaltedly on the sternness of fate and the pathos of disjointed wedlock. You would have been expected to follow her moods — to rejoice when she was glad and to be lugubri- ous when she was depressed — and to be at her beck and call sufficiently to be willing to fill places at the last minute at her dinner- parties (by which means she would be able to dispense with my society excepting on the one A MABBIED MAN 77 or two formal occasions in every year wlien she wonld invite us both together), and to pass examinations on the marked passages in the books she lent you. And in return, Fred, she would have vouchsafed you on every occasion her most yearning smile and her most gracious hand-pressure, and she would never have wearied of holding forth to you, beside her dainty tea-table by subdued lamp-light, upon all the osophies." " Dearest," said I, as Josephine, having con- cluded her exposition, regarded me with a sus- picion of mockery in her dark eyes, " you should have put me on my guard ; you should not have subjected your Frederick to such un- toward liabilities." " So I did. I warned you at the start — the evening she gave you the rose-bud — that she would be proud to add you to her collection. But what use would it have been to warn you ? " Josephine added, eating her words with the sweet complacency peculiar to the female logician ; " you would not have believed me. Have you forgotten your haughty refusal to subscribe to my proposition, that married people who love each other cannot expect to have a very good time in society ? " 78 THE REFLECTIONS OF "And I have suffered for it," I replied, meekly. "We have both of us suffered ia making the discovery; but it is a genuine discovery. Hold up your right hand, Fred, and repeat after me, to show that you are thoroughly contrite and convinced, Married people — who really love each other — cannot expect to have — a very good time in society." I did as I was bid, and I was tempted to add a heart-felt amen, which evidently sug- gested to Josephine that I had derived from her formula hopes of emancipation beyond her purpose, for she hastened to add, with distinct- ness : " All the same, we shall have to continue to accept invitations now and then ; we owe it to ourselves and to baby to do so. And I am rather inclined to think that, having once and finally dismissed all roseate anticipations and made up our minds to expect very lit- tle, we shall really enjoy ourselves tolerably well." " Just as people who have lost a leg grad- ually find life bearable in the teeth of being obliged to hobble." " What an unpleasant analogy, Fred ! No, A MARRIED MAW 79 dear, I expect to reap my enjoyment from the consciousness of how very much nicer you are than other men and from being glad that it is so." ■VI. SAID my predecessor in ownership of the house which I occupy, as we were walk- ing away from the registry, just after the title had passed, " You asked the other day why we wished to move, and I told you we needed more room. That was true enough ; but the controlling reason is my wife's conviction that we shall never have a boy so long as we live in that block. She began saying so when our fourth girl was bom, and we have five girls now. It is a girl block. We have lived there eight years, and during all that time there has been but a single boy baby bom in it, and he died within twenty-four hours. As I tell my wife, by moving we can only have another girl at the worst, and on the other hand a change may break the succession. But very likely you prefer girls." My preferences on this score at that period were very vague, yet, in spite of my freedom BBFLEGT10N8 OF A MARRIED MAN 81 from superstitions in general, I could not avoid the reflection that it would have been more considerate of my vendor to mention this flaw in the title before the papers were passed, if he felt it incumbent upon him to do so at all. Accordingly, when my wife divulged to me, one day about a year later, that the couple in question, who were living in an adjacent street, had been blessed with twins, and girl twins at that, I was ungenerous enough to wave my dinner napkin around my head and to chant a paean. " Perhaps that will remove the spell from our block," said Josephine, yearningly. " Who knows ? " I answered, snatching at the suggestion, for, to tell the truth, by reason doubtless of the very fact that ours was said to be a girl block, we had both set our hearts on having a boy. And although the appalling character of our predecessor's statistics had been somewhat modified by the discovery that of the twenty houses in our row several were occupied by old maids, and one by an elderly single gentleman, and several more by people who had no children at all, and at least four by couples whose children were too old to have been born within the specified eight years, the 6 82 THE REFLECTIONS OF most searching investigation on the part of Josephine had failed to invalidate his testi- mony regarding the gender in the households where there had been biiihs. As a conse- quence she had confided to me more than once that she felt in her bones it would be a girl, and, though I wore a confident front in her presence, the serenity of my brow could not always dispel the haimting recollection that I had seen men at the club lose a dozen games of whist running by obstinately sticking to the same seat. Analogously, was it not high- ly probable that by braving destiay I had entailed upon myseK a long hne of daugh- ters? The birth of little Fred in the teeth of local tradition and parental foreboding was followed at a comparatively short period by the arrival of another son, whose angelic presence — such is the contrariness of human nature — evoked from his mother, after she and he were com- fortably out of the woods, an insinuation to the effect that there might be too much of a good thing. " You mustn't think for an instant that I would wish baby to be other than the sweet little cherub he is " — these were her exact A MARBIED MAN 83 words — " but if we should ever have another, Fred, I do hope it will be a girl." " If we should have another ! " The tenta- tiveness (as the novelists say) of the expres- sion betrayed that even Josephine, with all her eagerness for a daughter, was not with- out some qualms on the score of adding to our joint parental buidens. It is a common device, both among people who have nothing to do and those whose mission it is to stimu- late thrifty instincts in the young, to call at- tention to the enormous sum total of pennies which results from beginning with a penny, and then doubling the penny, and after multi- plying the product by two to continue doub- ling the successive multiplications once a day for a calendar month. The product is in the millions, if not billions. While it cannot be said that the responsibilities and expenses of the modem parent moimt upward with quite the same fatal, facility as in the case of the pennies (let the unmercenary or merely arith- metical substitute horse-shoe nails), there is certainly considerable analogy between the two processes. Leaving aside as too pathological for mention the circumstance, including a monthly nurse at ever so much a minute and 84 THE REFLECTIONS OF meals by herself, -wliicli attends the ushering into existence of each successive little stranger, the modern paterfamilias may be said to lay the apex stone of his inverted pyramid by the purchase of a baby-carriage — to be relined and refurbished for each new-comer. And then, O ye gods ! mark how the pyramid mounts and spreads ! From the baby-wagon to the rattle and the woolly horse ; from the woolly horse to the balloon, the tricycle (or a doll which will shut her eyes), and two extra quarts of milk daily ; from extra quarts of milk daily to extra chops and eggs daily, boots and shoes, the kindergarten, rabbits, and puzzling inter- rogatories to be answered concerning the In- finite ; from puzzling interrogatories to the safety (?) bicycle (or a doll which will talk), manual training in carpentry, the dancing academy, and patent-leather pumps, plates for the teeth, the whooping-cough, a miniature steam-engine (or a doll's house which is broader than the door-sUl), and a detective camera ; from a detective camera — prithee, is it not a goodly pile already ? And yet its proportions are still but a tithe of what will follow. Up- ward and ever broadening mounts your pyra- mid imtil its surface rivals in magnificent area A MARRIED MAN 85 ttat famous hat of the Quangle Wangle Quae of Lear's ditty : " For liis hat was one hundred and two feet wide, With ribbons and bibbons on every side, And bells and buttons and loojjs and lace. So that nobody ever could see the face Of the Quangle Wangle Quee ! " Verily the married man of to-day with a rising family becomes frightened if he allows himself to ponder the situation. He lies awake at night and is disposed to offer a chair to every life-insurance agent who intrades upon his privacy. And, as Josephine often says, the worst of it is, there is really nothing to be done about it. Would you have the children wear the same thin flannels all the year round ? Do you relish the idea of seeing little Fred arrive at man's estate with crooked front teeth, when by the outlay of a few paltry dollars at the present time they could be made regular as a palisade ? Are the sons of Tom, Dick, and Harry to be sent to a summer school in the Adirondacks and ours made to breathe sea- air all the year round ? Is little Josephine to go without a kodak when her dearest friend, Polly Dolly Adeline, is pressing the button 86 TEE BWFLEOTIONS OV from moming until night? Assuredly not. Against luxuries we turn a stony countenance ; but wlio will aver that warm underwear, regu- lar front teeth, occasional change of atmosphere, and development of the artistic instincts are not necessaries which parents are bound to provide for their offspring ? When destiny finally matched our two boys with a sister apiece — not twins, thank you — discussion between us as to whether sons or daughters are more to be desired became in a certain sense futile for Josephine and me ; and yet the theme is one which crops up between us with tolerable frequency from the very rea- son that we are confronted by both horns of the dilemma. " I don't think I should have had any par- ticular preference at the beginning for a boy rather than a girl but for that horrid man," said Josephine, on one occasion. " Of course when he tried to make out that this was a girl street, I became just crazy for a son. Perhaps it is rather more satisfactory on the whole to have a boy at the head of the family ; he is impressed early with a sense of responsibility, and that he must look after his sisters for the rest of his life. However, it doesn't matter very much which A MARRIED MAN 87 comes first, provided you have both. But if you could only have one kind and you had to choose which (fortunately it is decided for us) I should find frightful difficulty in making up my mind. For your sake, Fred, I suppose I should choose a boy. I know it is popularly asserted that fathers are fonder of their daughters than their sons; but, on the other hand, nearly every man has a sneaking vanity to preserve the family name from dying out, which would determine him if it came to a choice." " It might be preferable to have the family name die out rather than to see it dragged in the dust. There is always that risk with sons," I answered, with sententious gravity. " In our , walk of life a girl cannot readily misbehave herself to any appreciable extent." " You would not, however, allow anyone else to suggest the possibility that your boys could turn out badly," said Josephine. "On the contrary,, although you have never said so in precise terms, I am sure you will be disap- pointed in youx heart of hearts if one, or both of them, does not prove very remarkable — a Michael Angelo, or a Darwin, or President of the United States." 88 THE BEFLECTIONS OF " Rather than see a son of mine President of the United States " I began, diverted from our theme by the invocation of the standard spectral hope which is used to prod the imagi- nation of every youth in the country ; but Jo- sephine interrupted the ancestral curse trem- bling on my lips, by remarking succinctly : " Nonsense. You don't believe a word you are going to say, Fred." She continued, with a reflective air, " I admit that girls are not lia- ble to fail in business, or forge, or drink more wine than is good for them. On the other hand, men can take care of themselves ; but what is there more pitiable than a decayed gentlewoman ? It is all very well to consider the enlarged sphere for feminine activity, and try to comfort one's self by the thought that they can be hospital nurses, or amanuenses, or reporters, or doctors, or even theatrical man- agers — I am confident that my girls would shine in any of these capacities if it were absolutely necessary — but I, for one, can't persuade my- self that they are intended for that sort of thing, and I am morally certain that you men will see that they do not grow rich and famous too rapidly in the work to which they are called. It may be that my great-great-grand- A MARRIED MAN 89 daughter will be President — not ' lady ' Presi- dent, if you please — of the United States. But that is a long way off, and in the meantime I should prefer to have my daughters and their daughters protected by a bulwark of railroad shares from the cold world of competition in manual or mental labor. Decayed gentlewomen were pitiful enough when they were able to eke out their livelihood by putting up peaches and plums and strawberries; but now that pre- serves — and really just as good preserves — are put up at factories by the wholesale, they must starve if they stay at home. Oh, Fred, I some- times think that you ought to alter your will so as to leave everything to the two girls ; but then I recollect how important it is also that boys should have a little something, so that they need not sacrifice their natural gifts and tastes to the exigencies of bread and butter. A few hundred dollars a year might be the de- termining factor which would enable one of them to become the second Michael Augelo or Dar- win of your fancy, instead of a humdrum bank president, or lawyer, or doctor." Although I, for one, have not quite such in- flated notions regarding the evolution of my sons as my wife would make out, nevertheless 90 TEE BEFLEOTIONS OF the married man who has renomicecl delusions on his own accoimt feels at Uberty to indulge his imagination to some extent on the subject of his offspring. Not merely the married man, but the married woman also. "Whatever Jo- sephine may asseverate to the contrary, I am confident that she cherishes quite as ardent hopes as I on the score both of her boys and of her girls. We may be a pair of fools, but we cannot avoid a secret conviction that little Fred has a remarkable head and brow which suggest the contour of a Webster, and that our second daughter is likely to take drawing-rooms by storm if her features preserve their present exquisite regularity until maidenhood. Then take our younger boy. I admit that he has neither the masterly physiognomy nor the com- manding aspect of his brother, but it is from just such habits of absorbing industry and from just such original traits that the capacity of a — a — well, call it a Michael Angelo or a Darwin and be done -with it — is developed. Then again there is our elder daughter. She could not be called handsome to-day, perhaps, but those who deem her plain and say that she is all legs and arms may well afford to bear in mind the story of the Ugly Duckliag which from being A MARRIED MAN" 91 the butt of the barn-yard proved to be a swan. And even if she fail to be strictly beautiful, a girl with her serene intelligence and vitalizing enthusiasm is almost certain to make her mark in this era of feminine progression. When comparing mine with other children I freely confess to a sensation of pride, which Josephine has assured me is common to parents . in general. She declares that our opposite neighbor, who has seven girls— a list- less, lanky set — is not a whit less proud of his progeny than I of mine. I could scarcely be- lieve this to be the case tmtil I happened to condole with him one day, when we were walking down-town together, on the size of his family and the circumstance that he had no sons. To my astonishment he replied : " Bless your heart ! I wouldn't part with one of them. And between you and me and the post, my dear sir, there are not seven other girls their peers in the entire country. Boys? If I had a son I should live in constant dread that he would blow his head off or be drowned while he was growing up, and when he was grown up that he would go to the demnition bow-wows. Boys ? No, thank you, neighbor." Two or three rebuffs of this kind have in- 92 THE BEFLEGTI0N8 OF clined me to believe that whatever the predi- lections of parents beforehand, they accept the inevitable with a fortitude which soon becomes fond devotion to their fate. I have rarely seen seven less attractive girls ; yet when I say so to my wife she is apt to taunt me with the insinuation that our friend across the way probably entertains similar views on the sub- ject of oiu: darlings. " But in the first place, Josephine, we have four, two boys and two girls — an ideal com- bination — and he has seven long, lanky girls, and no boys at all." " He has told you plainly that he would not part with one of them for the world, and that he abhors the sight of a boy, and he is thor- oughly in earnest in what he says." " Surely, my dear, you don't maintain that there is any comparison in point of looks, man- ners, or brains between our children and his ? " "Not the slightest, Fred. You know my opinion regarding those girls perfectly well; but you can't blame him, poor man, for not seeing that they are an unattractive, homely set, any more than people would be disposed to blame you because you are convinced that little Fred will some day set the world afire." A MAMMIfiH) MAN 93 " But he is likely to ; or — er — if not to set it afire exactly, to " " Of course lie will, tlie darling ! " broke in my wife, with a bubbling laugh. " You are too delicious for anything, Fred. You insist not only that your geese are all swans, but you expect the world to agree with you. Now I am just as confident as you that our children are remarkable, and no amount of argument could abate a jot or tittle my faith in their future ; but at the same time I have not the hardihood to demand that other people should take the same view. You are a veritable pai'ental ostrich, Fred ; quite as complete a one as your friend across the street, who is very likely at this moment to be priding him- seK on the fact that none of his seven have red hair, and pitying us because David and Josie have conspicuously gory locks." " Pooh ! " I answered, stiffly. " Josie's hair is a beautiful shade of auburn ; any one of his girls might be proud to have hair like it. And as for David's, it is a good, honest color, if it is red." " There you go again, my dear. So are blue and green honest colors, and yet you could scarcely caU " 94 THE REFLEGTI0N8 OF " Psliaw ! " I interrupted, with a slightly irritated air. Even Josephine has a way of arguing at times which is decidedly nettle- some. Faults? Imperfections? There are days when the most completely infatuated father looks gloomily askance at his offspring ; when it seems to him that their disadvantageous points stick out so prominently as to over- shadow their attractions, and he almost wishes they had never been bom. A cold in the head, an unbecoming costume, or nothing at aU will transform my namesake into a stolid- looking little ruiBan whom I find difficulty in recognizing ; and as Josephine says, the chil- dren are sure to look their worst when you wish them to look their best. She declares that I always select the most unpropitious times for exhibiting them; for instance, just after they have finished supper or been on their hands and knees in the nursery all the afternoon, and she is disposed to rate me for exhibiting them at any time on the ground that niue people out of ten who come to the house would prefer not to see them. However this may be, I have noticed that, whereas they will be excruciatingly polite to any chance A MABBIED MAN 95 person who happens in, they seem to take a fiendish satisfaction in ignoring or merely grunting at your bosom friend or the judge of the Supreme Court whom you have asked to dinner. And if, by some happy freak, they acquit themselves creditably so far as manners are concerned, is not one invariably tempt- ed to apologize for little Fred's suddenly de- veloped squint, or Winona's unusual lack of color ? It is on the occasions when the children are looking and behaving theii- worst that visitors are most apt to caU attention to their resem- blance either to my wife or me. However much you may inwardly resent such an imputation at the moment, it is not easy in these days, when the law of heredity is on everyone's lips, to es- cape noting with considerable horror, as time goes on, the reproduction of your own or your mother-in-law's peculiarities. When Joseph- ine says that little Fred will not sit up straight at table because he inherits my rooted tendency to sprawl, I am apt to reply, if in a pesky mood, that David gets his red hair from his maternal .great-grandmother. In this matter of inher- ited traits, be it said, a man can bear with far more complacency the reappearance of his own 96 THE REFLECTIONS OF ancestral failings, than those which appertain to his wife's family tree. Though there may be room for argument as to whether little Fred's fiuious temper (he had a way, when small, of lying on his back and kicking at the least prov- ocation) was transmitted through Josephine's blood or mine, there is not the slightest doubt that our eldest daughter derives her double chin from the old lady, my wife's great aunt, whose portrait in a turban hangs in our dining- room. If it be tolerably dispiriting to note one's own foibles coming to light in the second generation, it is far more so to encounter idio- syncrasies with which you have no association, and for which, therefore, you keep no tender spot in your heart. I have a fellow sympathy with little Fred's tendency to sprawl, and his disinclination to get up in time for breakfast ; but I tell Josephine, when she accounts for "Winona's abhorrence of oysters, by the tradition that two of her own aunts could not abide shell- fish in any form, that they were a precious pair of donkeys. "If they were your aunts, though," said Josephine to me one day with some warmth, " you would think it the most natural thing in the world, just as you always grandiloquently A MABBIED MAN 97 describe your ancestor who used to execute people as ' the sheriff of the county,' whereas, if he had been mine, you would be sure to speak of him as a common hangman." There are occasions when Josephine betrays a degree of excitement disproportionate to the necessities of the situation, 7 vn. T EETALIATED on my wife for naming lit^ 1 tie Fred after me by naming Josie after her. Josephine declared I might talk until I was black in the face, but she never would con- sent to name her eldest son after anyone but his father. When I referred to the confusion which would result from the presence in the house of two people with the same name, she tossed her head and said that it would be easy to obviate that by calling me Frederick instead of Fred. She added that Frederick was much more dignified and appropriate to the father of a family, and that she had been intending to make the substitution ever since we were mar- ried. To tell the truth, I did not relish the threat- ened change. When a man has answered to a name for more than a quarter of a century, it is rather appalling to be informed that if he answers to it henceforth he is likely to con- REFLECTIONS OF A MABRIED MAN 99 found liimseU: witli an infant. On the previous occasions when Josephine had solemnly de- clared her intention to exorcise Fred, I had smiled inwardly, feeling sure that she would forget to begin ; but it was obvious to me now, that, for the sake of baby, she was prepared to school her tongue and the tongues of all my relations and friends in the execution of her fell purpose. Imagine Harry BoUes apd other kindred spirits calling me stiff, august Frede- rick ! I vowed that this should not be brought to pass, and having become convinced that it was simply a question of time when my son and heir would be christened after me, I gra- ciously consented to send for the clergyman on the distinct understanding that I was to remain Fred to the end of time, confusion to the con- trary notwithstanding. Our second boy was christened David, after his maternal grandfather. When our elder daughter was born I proclaimed firmly my purpose to name her for her mother. Jose- phine squirmed like an eel, metaphorically speaking, at the suggestion, and I discovered for the first time that she had detested her own name from early childhood. She argued that there was no sense in calling a girl after her 100 TEE REFLECTIONS OF mother, for the reason that no advantage of association, as in the case of a father, could possibly be derived from it, and that she vp^ould have sufficient trouble, as time went on, in keeping my underwear distinct from little Fred's without being confronted by a similar difficulty on the feminine side of the house. " On the other hand," I murmured, with an accession of sentiment which brought a blush to her cheeks despite her predisposition to frown, " my dearest wish is to see another Jo- sephine in the flesh, complete even to the name. Moreover, as you have had full scope twice already, it is only fair that I should be allowed for once to carry out my own ideas." So Josephine she was christened, though we call her Josie, and I have very little doubt that my wife in the depths of her inner conscious- ness would have been bitterly disappointed if the child had been given any other name. When number four appeared — our second daughter — Josephine declared that she was tired of family names and wished something out of the common run. After mooning about the house for a day or two with pencil and paper, she handed me the following list em- bodying the fruit of her cogitation : Ethel, A MARRIED MAN 101 Enid, Corinne, Dorothy, Gladys, Margery, Millicent, Annabel, and Letitia. She spared me, however, the necessity of criticism by stat- ing that not one of them would do ; that every other child nowadays was named Gladys, Dor- othy, or Margery ; that Ethel did not hit her fancy, and that the rest were hideous. "Why don't you call her plain Mary?" I asked, by way of a suggestion. " The child will be plain enough, I dar^;say," said my wife, dryly. " I am quite aware, "^ she added, " that we shall be in a certain sense gambling with divine Providence in giving the, darling a conspicuous, individualizing name, for she may grow up commonplace-looking or a fright; but we must take some chances in life, mustn't we, Fred ? " "Either Eosamond, Eleanor, or Guendolen is appropriate to a beauty," said I, with non- committal subserviency. " I should prefer something more original. A man with your training in the classics ought to be able to rattle off half a dozen that would be suitable. Try, dear, to think of some." Having obediently ransacked the recesses of my mental store-house, and consulted on the sly a mythological dictionary and the Bible, in- 102 TEE REFLECTIONS OF eluding the Apocrypha, I reported progress as follows : " Ceres, Naomi, Diana, Jael, Andro- meda, Niobe, and Cleopatra." " ' Like Niobe all tears,' " murmured Jo- sephine, reflectively. " They would bother her life out by quoting that at her, I suppose. I had thought of Pallas. Why wouldn't Pallas do, Fred ? I don't know a Pallas, and it sounds rather distinguished. As I remember her, she was entirely respectable. Cleopatra is pretty, but the trouble is that she wasn't entirely re- spectable." " Why Pallas rather than Pocahontas ? " I asked, with sober mien but sardonic purport. "Pocahontas? "screamed my darling. But presently she added, with a musing air : " A really pretty Indian name wouldn't be bad at all. Minnehaha? No, that's too hackneyed." " Tuscarora ? " I hazarded. " A little too bold and expansive, perhaps." " Tes, dear, I think that ' Tuscarora ' would frighten away the average suitor." " Cacouna, then ? " "Ugh!" "Oneida?" " I don't like it." "Winona? There! Why wouldn't that be A MARRIED MAN 103 Just the thing ? It is picturesque and original, and to my ears decidedly fetching." " Winona ? " queried Josephine, in a pen- sive tone which suggested that it had rather caught her fancy. " It's queer, Fred, but it is fetching and picturesque as you say, and decidedly original. I should like to sleep on it." On the fourth morning after this she in- formed me, with a beatific smile, that the matter was settled ; she had heard a mysteri- ous voice in her sleep, on three consecutive nights, cry aloud — " Winona — Winona^ — ^Wi- nona." " I regard that as the interposition of Provi- dence," she added, " and if the child grows up homely and puny and utterly out of keeping with her name, I shaU consider that I have been very shabbily treated by fate." It is amazing how soon the pig-like, rubi- cund objects of parental solicitude, which erst bent upon you their steel-blue eyes and wailed, develop a marked personality of their own. The married man with sons of four or five years is likely to suffer himself to be jabbed with a yard-stick in his bath, morning after morning, under the guise of a hippopotamus at bay, in 104: THE EEFLEGTIONS OF order to cater to the sporting tastes of one, and to croon tlie same ditty a dozen times in monotonous succession for the sake of edifying the lyrical instincts of another. What spinster can appreciate a mother's joy at the discovery that her doll of flesh and blood has teeth like everybody else ? What bachelor can under- stand the complacency of the father who di- vines from the first articulate word that his heir is not completely an idiot ? Close upon the heels of evolution follows the bubbling re- frain of parental ecstasy. You stand amazed with delight before the first witticism and dub it clever enough for lAfe or Punch ; you scan with dancing eyes the bird's nest of clay be- stowed upon you as a birthday present, and whisper to your wife that the Liliputian do- nor has a sculptor's eye and fingers. Simultaneously Avith this spirit of wonder at the normal development of your offspring, and with your cognizance of the individuality of each, arises within you the desire and almost rabid intention to equip them as completely as possible for the struggle of existence, to dis- guise and fortify the weak spots left by des- tiny, and to foster the talents with which Dame Nature has endowed them. You are deter- A MARRIED MAN 105 mined that the mistakes committed in your own education shall not be duplicated in theirs, and- bent on acting with consummate wisdom, you consult current authorities on child culture and lend an alert ear to every suggestion in the ■^line of hygienic or pedagogic reform. You purse your lips in the throes of indecision as to whether or not baby shall wear shoes and socks. You cite having worn them yourself, forsooth, and that your own feet, save for a pet com or two, have been, and are, to all intents and all purposes, available, and you indulge in horrible imaginings on the score of influenza and lockjaw ; but you sigh when your wife asks if you set yourself up as wiser than the doctors, who insist that the young should re- turn to the customs of nature, and like as not, before another week you are leading your pre- cious toddler barefoot along the flinty pave- ment with a superior smile. What though you have been taught to spell cat c-a-t ! Do you not bow your head to the superior wisdom of the age, which asserts that it should be spelt cah-ah-te, and rejoice that your young hope- fuls are not being outstripped by their con- temporaries ? Yea, Yerily ; and though you yourself could read when you were five, you 106 THE BBFLE0TI0N8 OF even humbly subscribe to the doctrine that if a child reads at eight it is time enough, provided that until then he is beguiled by grewsome kindergarten carols and the manufacture of paper patch-work for the presentation to an admiring household at Christmas-tide. Pain- fully conscious that you have failed to make the most of yoiu* own life, you are eager to af- ford your children every opportunity to im- prove upon it, albeit at the sacrifice of your most stalwart and fundamental convictions. What parent would restore the days when a father was addressed on paper as " Honored Sir," and the offending scion of his stock slunk up the stairs in apprehension of the rod ? Not I, for one. And yet, as Josephine says, it is not exactly pleasant to be snuffed out at forty by the superior wisdom of the rising genera- tion, even though that wisdom be tempered by affectionate toleration of nominal control. Nevertheless, after you have grown accus- tomed to the idea that you are comparatively speaking an ignoramus, and that your ex- perience of life is to be rated merely as so much fustiness, is not abundant satisfaction to be derived from the pride one takes in the superseding knowledge of one's progeny? ^ A MARRIED MAN 107 Even though you may feebly protest at the ruthless sweeping away of established codes by the youth of twelve and the miss of fifteen, you feel puffed up by the amazing enlighten- ment of your sons and daughters. As time goes on you positively glow with satisfaction at each successive display of information or theory which controverts the truths upon which you have acted all your days. You scratch your head and learn with wondering delight that William Tell was a mythical humbug, that the novels of Sir Walter are rather a bore than otherwise, and that all illness is hallucination. If, tempted to defend the wisdom of the past, you proffer the testimony of books, you yield respectfully to -the triumphant plea of a newer edition or a later authority, wherein the facts or arguments on which you relied are contra- dicted or exploded. What glorious opportuni- ties are given you to examine and rehabilitate your moral standards by the searching light of modem philosophy ! You are informed by lips on which the down of manhood is scarcely per- ceptible, that competition in trade is akin to crime ; that the proletariat should be restraiued by legislation from generating children faster than it can provide for them, and that, owing 108 THE BEFLBOTIONS OF to the failing powers of the sun, our world will in a comparatively short period become too cold to inhabit. And if, under the spur of a whim- sical mood, you venture to insinuate that this world has long been a cold one for the average inhabitant, the sad, sickly smile with which your witticism is received convicts you of levity and a disposition to make light of serious ^subjects. Indeed, there is something charmingly pathetic, even if occasionally irri- tating, in the tacit criticism of your whole course in life which you read written on the grave countenances of your sons and daughters. Pathetic, and yet at the same time mirth-pro- voking, in spite of more or less justice, by virtue of the glorious self-delusion. You are in their eyes the fond and loving father, but equally the humdrum practical man of affairs governed by workaday considerations, and void of poetic impulse save mere domesticity. Un- like them you have never tried to probe the secrets of eternity and grappled with the fire spirits of thought. To you the moon has been but a night-lamp and no inspirer of mighty resolutions and world-conquering hopes. You have lived always as now, a struggler for bread and butter, a creature of dull routine, getting A MARRIED MAN 109 up and lying down, eating and drinking, spend- ing and saving, thermometer and watch con- sulting, with a tedious regularity of which they do not intend to be guilty. They adore you for the loving care you have lavished upon them and the opportunities you have given them, but their eyes let you understand, though they would fain spare your feelings, that whereas your feet have ever clung to earth, their look is fixed upon the stars. Glorious self-delusion which, even while it castigates, tickles the parental diaphragm! Upon the stars ! God grant that their look never swerve. Said I to Josephine one evening, as we were sitting side by side on the sofa after our dar- ling critics had gone to bed — " One would sup- pose that you and I, in the bygone days, had never sailed the seas of fantasy with the Cor- sair, or apostrophized solitude on the moun- tain-top with Childe Harold ; that we had bowed in the dust before ancestral dogma, and clung to the belief that the 'Animals went m two by two, the elephant and the kangaroo ; ' that philanthropy was a strange word to us ; that we had revelled in defective drainage, and that we did not kiss each other when we were engaged." 110 REFLECTIONS OF A MARRIED MAN "Poor little dears," said my wife, "how much they have still to learn ! It would break their hearts if they had to know now that in the end they would be only just a little better than we. Do you remember how you used to repeat : ' ' ' Not once or twice in our rough island-story The path of duty was the way to glory. He that walks it only thirsting For the right and learns to deaden Love of self, before his journey closes He shall see the stubborn thistle bursting Into glossy purples which ontredden AW voluptuous garden-roses.' " " And yet," said I, " I am only a hard-work- ing and tolerably impecunious lawyer." vni. THE married man with a family who is de- pendent on the income from his labors for a liTing, is necessarily a creature of routine. Day in day out he rises from bed, hones his razor, takes his bath, swallows his break- fast, reads the newspaper, and hies him down to'wn with the monotonous exactness of a pen- dulum. He is engrossed by the cares of busi- ness until four or five o'clock in the afternoon, and in the brief interim between his closing time and his dinner hour he walks, rides, or frequents the gymnasium for exercise, plays whist, visits a picture gallery and the book- stores, pays a call or attends a committee meeting in the interest of political or charita- ble reform, and reaches home barely in time to become a bear for the amusement of his children before they drop off to sleep. In the evening he dines out now and then, and now and then he takes his wife to the theatre or a 112 THE BEFLEOTIONS OF concert ; but ordinarily, after exhausting the newspaper at home and cutting the pages of the current magazines, he settles down to read the newest volume of biography or travel, and is aroused by his wife an hour later on the plea that if he sleeps longer he will lie awake at night. It is only on Sundays and holidays that the busy man of affairs escapes from the clutches of inexorable custom, and even these respites from habit are so fleeting that he has barely begun to realize that he is free before they have passed and he is a slave again. And yet how precious in his regard, in spite of their limitations, do these breathing spells from rou- tine become as the years advance, and he has grown a trifle sober, and almost imperceptibly gray ! There are the baked beans and fish- balls of New England to begin with, to en- hance the comfort of his late, leisurely break- fast. The bits of Shakespeare and Shelley with which, stretched at his ease, he refreshes the dusty dryness of his spirit, well up in his memory through the week, and until another Thanksgiving or Decoration Day his eyes are brighter for their glimpses of meadow and hil- lock, and his limgs are sounder for theii- inspi- A MARRIED MAN 113 ration of purer air. Does lie not begrudge the passage of the fly-swift hours during which he learns to know his little ones from their own lips, when out of sight of paTements he wanders with them through the wood, or teaches them to paddle up the suburban stream ? Avaunt the Sunday newsfiaper with its vampire wings, and the stufiy club with its corrosive sublimate of brandy and soda ! He yearns more and more for the weekly boon of exchanging the paraphernalia of workaday ex- istence for the simple pleasures of loving com- radeship with his family, and contact with na- ture so far as she is to be encountered within the radius of a sabbath day's journey. But the Mecca of the married man's hopes is his annual vacation, so called from the deep- ly-rooted intention in his soul to make it a yearly occurrence ; but which is ordinarily in- terfered with three years out of five, notwith- standing his proneness to prophesy glibly that other men, who neglect to shut their desks for a reasonable period in the course of every twelvemonth, will surely break down. It is a splendid theory for other men to act upon, and still more splendid for yourself at those rare conjunctions when there is perfect composure 8 114- THE REFLECTIONS OF alike in the business world and in your domes- tic household. You pack your rods and fever- ishly order relays of groceries — and then something turns up which obliges you to change your plans and put off until another year your projected outing in the woods, where not even a telegram will reach you. It may be that you are called upon to act as the assignee of an insolvent estate, the pickings from which wiU be considerable, or that the children break out with the measles, or that you discover the entire drainage system of your house to be in need of immediate overhauling. Under any of these circumstances a married man must stay at home. He cannot afford to neglect his bus- iness, or to desert his family in distress. Plence, in spite of his rigid principles, he is very apt to persuade himself that, by passing the summer at some watering-place accessible from town by a dusty, daily railway journey, he is getting all the vacation he needs, especially because he reaches home occasionally, on the hottest afternoons, by three instead of five. "Are you all ready? " you inquire of your wife, entering her room in a flurry some day about the middle of June, having just come post-haste from down town. A MARRIED MAN 115 "Are we really going ? " "Going? Of course we are going. The carriage will be at the door in less than an hour." " Considering that I have had to pack three times during the past fortnight as a conse- quence of as many determinations on your part which you have subsequently reconsidered, you can scarcely blame me for asking the ques- tion. I shall be ready, dear." " We are going without fail this time. I have bought the tickets and telegraphed for guides, and told them at the office that I shan't be back for three weeks. Has that man sent my fishing things ? " "A great many things have come for you." You cast a searching, ruffled glance around you at the profusion of packages occupying the lounge and the floor, and realize from their respective proportions that your rubber coat, a new bamboo rod, a landing-net, an air- cushion for yourself and another for your darling, some groceries, and a box of fly-oint- ment have arrived. Something is plainly missing, however, from the agonized fashion in which you drop upon your knees and rum- mage through the bundles, ripping the twine 116 THE REFLECTIONS OF and paper from each with increasing de- spair. " Where is my new reel and line ? That brute has neglected to send either them or the trout flies I ordered. I will sue him ; I " As you fulminate, you glare at your wife with the ferocity of an incensed tiger ; it is the sudden guilty quailing of her eyes which checks your objurgations. At the same moment she stoops and ducks her head to the base of the lounge, and after groping with the yard- stick produces the missing articles, remarking nonchalantly that the baby had been playing with them, and must have pushed them under- neath. You are so glad to get them that you merely gi'owl inarticulately while you undo with eager fingers the precious package. You scrutinize the dainty rubber reel with a contented smile, and in the serenity of recovered good nature dart at the box of fly-ointment, and insist that your wife shall take a smell of the horrible- looking mixture of pennyroyal and tar. She declares that she abominates the odor and that she would rather be bitten by all the flies in creation than soil her skin with a drop of it, and you answer that you are rather fond of A MARRIED MAN 117 the smell and that it is really remarkably clean stuff. While she collects and packs your things you go iiitting about the room with a brow wrinkled by the conviction that you have for- gotten something fundamental, and your heart dances like a daffodil as you come across your tooth-brush in the last five minutes. Just when the carriage is at the door you bound up the stairs two steps at a time for your watch-key, which you have left on your pin-cushion, and you breathlessly vow on your return that you will buy a stem-winding watch with your next spare cash. In consequence of the cabman's an- nouncement that you have no time to lose if you wish to catch the train, your farewell to youi' children in the hall is a hasty nip, and you arraign your wife for the more profuse os- ctilations which she is lavishing upon them. You are off at last, thank goodness, with the memory of four heads and noses pressed against the window-pane in the final exuberance of god-speed. Happy is the benedict who feels that his vacation is incomplete without the society of his gentle spouse ! Happy too is the spouse who is not so gentle as to be deterred by buga- 118 TEE REFLECTIONS OF boos in the shape of fears of what may befall her children during her absence, or by antipa- thy for the discomforts of the pathless woods from accompanying her husband ! It is well- nigh impossible to overcome the nervousness of many women sufficiently to induce them to leave home for more than a day or two at a time. There is, moreover, a considerable num- ber of the softer sex whose constitutional hor- ror of snakes and the kindred accessories of a sylvan outing, remains paramount to every other consideration. I am happy to state that Josephine is blessed with a certain serenity of nature which enables her to abandon her off- spring for moderate periods without perturba- tion, and merely to lift her skirts and run with- out screaming when she encounters a reptile. It seems almost like your wedding journey over again as you are whirled along in the train by the side of your sweet partner, and in the exuberance of this romantic suggestion you whisper, " Do you suppose, dear, that they take us for a newly married couple ? " " What a perfect goose you are, Fred ! Don't flatter yourself that you can shuffle off the staid aspect of a paterfamilias of forty simply by turning the key on the children." A MARBIED MAN 119 "Dear little sotds!" I ejaculate. "Wouldn't it be nice if we had been able to bring one or two of them with us ? " "No, it wouldn't," answers Josephine, flatly. " I was just thinking what a perfect blessing it was to be completely free from them for a fortnight, and all alone with my dearest." Thereupon her head drops involuntarily npon my shoulder, where it reposes until T can no longer resist the temptation of remark- ing, " I think we pass very well for a newly married pair." " You nasty thing, Fred ! " she retorts, bob- bing bolt upright as though electrified. " Just as I was so comfortable, too ! " Neither argument nor flattery can induce her to resume her superincumbent posture ; but finally, perhaps, she relents so far as to permit you to hold her hand. On goes the train whizzing and jolting into the twilight, which fades away into a pitchy landscape illumined now and again by twinkling cottage lights, and now by the glare of urban electricity. Puff ! Pouff ! You glide into a smoke-vaulted station where the vernacular of the attendant popu- lace smacks of apple-pie and cider. Whir-r ! Sh-h ! You rumble across a bridge from which 120 THE REFLECTIONS OF you catcli a glimpse below of swift, black water, and in another minute you are shooting past a foundry whose chimneys belch splen- did tongues of fire. " How little Fred would delight in that ! " murmurs my angel. " I thought the children were a forbidden subject." Only a gentle pressure of my hand for an- swer. On, on we jostle through the night. The tireless engine twists and turns through moun- tain valleys from the sides, of which forests of pine send down impenetrable gloom. There is a colder, fresher savor to the air as you step to the door to ascertain why the train has sudden- ly come to a standstill. " Only a cow on the track," passes from mouth to mouth after a few moments of sus- pense, during which a vision of your orphaned children floats pathetically before your mind's eye. Josephine does not need to be told what you are thinking about, as witness her pensive query after the train is once more underway. " I wonder, Fred, if they would care just a little if we were telescoped." Eleven o'clock. Only twenty minutes more and you will be due at the little jumping-off A MARRIED MAN 121 place where you are to pass the night, and from which you are to set out for camp in the morning. You begin to be harassed by doubts as to whether your telegram has been received, which are not allayed until the countenance of Pete, your sometime Indian Guide, looms from the platform. He wastes no words ; his grin, welcome in spite of its stolidity, and the shake of his hand give way to the obliga- tion of possessing himself of aU your traps. Still he eyes the white woman furtively until you find leisure to remark, "Pete, this is my wife, and Josephine, my dear, this is Pete." Introductions to Josephiae follow of mine host of the inn, whom I congratulate on the improvements in his rattle-trap, and, after we have inspected our room, of Pete's yoimger brother, Oscar, who is to be the pilot of her canoe, and whose sole exemption from immo- bility appears to be a guttural grunt. I put searching questions to Pete regarding our chances of good sport, the replies to which are diplomatically non-committal and then we seek our chamber to woo slumber on behalf of an early start. Slumber? Would that expectation were father to reality ! What inducement to repose 122 THE REFLECTIONS OF is to be found in blankets narrower by six inches than the width of the bed requires? Two minutes after you have tucked yourseK in gloriously about the shoulders — for the moun- tain air feels just a trifle chilly — a gentle tug de- stroys your handiwork. Without delay you give a resolute tug in the opposite direction, and immediately the voice of your darling protests. " What are you doing, Fred ? You have not left me an inch of bed-clothes." Another tug, still gentle but more deter- mined than the first accompanies her words, arousing the spirit of evil within you. "Confound it all, it's a perfect outrage to give us a bed like this," I reply, springing up with a kick which destroys whatever semblance of order there is left, and I strike a match viciously. I raise the kerosene lamp, and by its dim light morosely survey the situation. "What are you trying to do, Fred?" my darling inquires, as I stride past the bed. I am really in search of my ulster, which is hanging at the other side of the room, but it suddenly occurs to me to slip back the bolt of the connecting door which leads iato the ad- joining chamber. A MARRIED MAN 123 " I'm going to sleep in the next room," I reply, gruffly. " But there may be someone in there al- ready," cries Josephine, sitting up in bed under the spur of her trepidation. " I don't care if there is," I answer, with a defiant mien resulting from secret belief that the apartment in question is empty. There- upon I pull at the door, which sticks hard. " You will wake the whole house. And oh, Fred, what if there should be anyone in there ! " I tie a towel around the knob and pull lusti- ly. The door yields at last and, flying open, reveals only the silence of the tomb. I enter holding the lamp high above my head, and my horrified eyes behold a bed completely stripped of everything save the striped mattress and bolster appropriate to a dismantled chamber. For one fell, furious moment I stand irreso- lute, then with a mighty stride I return to my own room, and seizing my ulster and certain other belongings, exclaim with stoical calm : " Good-night, Josephine." " Oh, Fred, I hate to have you leave me. Let me sleep in there and you here. It is your vacation and you need all the rest you can get. Are you sui-e the bed is comfortable ? " 124 THE REFLECTIONS OF "I am going to sleep there," I answer with diplomatic firmness, stooping to kiss her. " You must barricade the door so that if it is anyone else's room no one can get in." Anyone else's room ! From the chill stuffi- ness of the atmosphere it seems as though it had been without an inmate for years. I ^vrap my ulster around me and do up my toes in my flannel shirt, and stretch myself on the straw mattress. Ruminating, I gradually acquire warmth, until a steady, far off murmur assures me that my darling is asleep at last. Then I sleep too. A few hours later we are peacefully skim- ming over the waters of the lake. Civilization lies behind us hidden by a bend. Keclining with an air of supreme comfort in our respec- tive canoes, we smile now and again at each other across the scarcely ruffled gap which separates us. It is a cloudless morning. The profile of the old man of the mountain, to which Pete calls our attention as we pass, stands out with clean-cut distinctness. A brace of shel- drake race by us almost within gunshot with plaintive squawk. The hills look glorious ia their garb of fresh green, and we screw our eyes to make out far away the barely discemi- JL MARRIED MAN 125 ble passage between tliem beyond whicli lies the virgin forest where we are to spend a fort- night out of reach of newspapers and the chil- dren. Our canoes are laden almost to the gimnel with our kit, comprising tents, woollen and rubber blankets, a cooking-stove, a trunk — Jo- sephine had insisted on bringing a trunk — canned soups, our rods, and a camera. By twilight all these have been safely landed by Pete and the guttural Oscar at the spot chosen as a camping ground — a 'beatific spot on the margin of the smallest and most picturesque of a trio of connecting lakes. Tall, majestic trees arch over us, but not too densely. A cool brook twinkles close at hand. Through a fringed clearing we behold across a black-blue sheet of water a monarch among mountains, whose stern sides run down to meet the lake in sheer walls rugged with scars from the glacier period. Our tents rise side by side in snowy ampli- tude. Within our guides spread layers of red- olent hemlock and adjust cheese-cloth nettings to baffle the predatory sand-fly. While Oscar builds a noble fire, Pete deftly strips layers of bark from the attendant birches and fashions a 126 THE BEFLEGTIONS OF dining-table, whicli charms the fancy of Joseph- ine so that she thrills with the threat of carry- ing home rolls upon rolls of birch-bark for the little ones. In an ecstasy of content we watch the safEfon sunset fade to soft violet and the first stars peep from the pellucid sky. I lie stretched at full length, glorying in the con- sciousness of rest and of freedom from care and contact with the workaday world. My wife and I, ever lovers, seemed to have usurped the realm of poetry for our sole use. And yet per- haps my lips are mute. Shall I tell her in bald speech that her eyes are more tender and trusting than the evening planet o'erhead, and her soul purer than the golden light of the de- parting day ? " Supper ! " The voice of Pete breaks in upon my shy meditation. We seat ourselves beneath a rus- tic canopy to feast ourselves on plenty : on fresh trout and fried eggs and collops of toast, whereat it may be our noses woidd have turned up in wonderment at home, but which we attack with the vigor of primitive man. We drink pannikins of tea strong as lye, and fear- lessly ask for more. Thrice at least since the canoes touched shore has Josephine derided A MARRIED MAN 127 my countenaaice, copper-colored from its coat- ing of tar and oil, and called heaven to witness that she disowned me as a husband ; but now at length the hour of my triumph arrives. " Ered ! " she ejaculates, breaking down com- pletely, "give me some of that stuff. They are aU over me ; they are driving me crazy ; in my ears, in my nostrils, in my mouth, and on both sides of my buttered toast. I cannot bear it a moment longer." I bid Pete build a smudge and I hasten to my tent for the precious mixture. Josephine essays it gingerly. " A little dab like that will be of no use," I exclaim firmly, and suiting the action to the word I baptize her delicate cheeks with glori- ous smears of the oleaginous compound, re- marking withal as a sop to her outraged spirit that it is excellent for the complexion. On the morrow we fish. On the morrow and on succeeding days. I and Josephine also. I with a fly-rod to the end, and she with a fly- rod for five minutes, during which she succeeds in hooking Oscar in the cheek and entangling herself well-nigh inextricably in her own cast- ing line. After this she prefers to troll, and she troUs indefatigably. That is, she reclines 128 THE BEFLEOTIONS OF with a graceful pose in her canoe and suffers herseH to be piloted from lake to lake. A rod is over her shoulder and a novel in her lap. She reads a little and she dozes a little, and when she feels a twitch, she twitches sooner or later in her turn. It is wonderful how many fish she manages to capture in this haphazard way, and, what is more, the largest monsters in the lake seek her hook. She reels them in in a seraphic fashion to the delight of Oscar and no less of Pete, who confides to me that my wife is a bom fisherman. I realize that this encomium embodies a tacit reflection on my own lack of science, not to be gainsaid by tales of quondam victories over muscallonge, salmon, and tarpon. It is very evident that I must be content to occupy in his eyes a rank completely second to the sweet angel of my bosom, who knows not the difference between a Brown Hackle and a Parmachenee Belle, and Avho frankly admits a preference for live bait. The days glide imperceptibly. There is a delicious sameness in them all, and yet each has its special charm. We angle and we medi- tate; we paddle and we vegetate. We make all-day excursions, and in the course of them take luncheon on tight little islands solitary A MARRIED JUAN 129 enough to arouse the envy of an Alexander Sel- kirk. We recall and quote poetry of which we have not thought for years. We photograph each other and our guides in every conceivable attitude, and our camp from every point of view. Josephine sees a pair of huge fiery eyes peering into her tent in the middle of the night, and will not be persuaded (even unto this day) that the intruder was a rabbit and not a bear. By the camp-fire Oscar exhibits to me Jo- sephine's new fly-rod splintered through con- tact with his weight in stepping backward, and articulates philosophically, " Lady no fly fish ; lady troll. Gentleman buy another when home. Indian mend pretty good perhaps." We bathe and cleanse our souls in the holy atmosphere of the summer evening, and once more, as in the days of our youth, we gaze be- tween the solemn pines at the lustrous night seeking the infinite. We whisper " peccavi " to the pitying stars, and in the conscious- ness of lack of power to pierce the mysteries of cosmos, my hand seeks hers and hers mine in token of the love for the sake of which alone we crave immortality. There comes a day when the walls of our tents fall like the walls of the houses of Jericho 9 130 BEFLEGTI0N8 OF A MABBIBD MAN at the voice of the prophet's trumpet. I take apart my rods, and Josephine arms herself with the vast collection of ferns and the rolls of birch-bark which she purposes to carry home with her. Mournfully we take a last look from our canoes at our dismantled camping-ground ; yet already my wife's eyes are bright with the thought of seeing the children again, and I am beginning to wonder what has been going on in the civilized world during the past fortnight. "We are sorry to be gorag, and yet we are glad. Josephine stigmatizes the rapture with which I receive a bundle of newspapers from a sports- man whom we pass on our way out as hysterical and almost indecent. " It was only a fortnight ago that you said you never wished to look at another newspaper, Fred." "And you, my dear, that it was a perfect blessing to be rid of the children," I retort, and then I absorb myself in the affairs of the body politic, oblivious alike of lake and forest. IX. SAID my wife to me one morning, just after the arrival of tlie postman, " Julia is go- ing to pay us a nice, long visit." " I'm glad to hear it," I answered, cheerUy. Julia is my wife's only sister, who lives in the suburbs and has been in the habit of stay- ing with us for a month or so during the win- ter ever since we have been man and wife. She is an attractive girl, but is less comely than Josephine and not so sagacious. In fact she has always seemed to me rather flighty. Still, as girls go, she is decidedly prepossess- ing, and I am very fond of her, notwithstand- ing the fact that Josephine invariably collapses after she has gone, as the result of her stay. " Julia will be nineteen the twenty-sixth of December," continued my wife reflectively. " I remember, dear, that she has labored all her life under the misfortune of a birthday so near Christmas that people made one present 132 THE BTSFLEOTIONS OP do double duty. I have always thought it was Tery hard on Julia." "Well, considering the hardship of her case," said my wife, boldy, taking advantage of my sportive mood, "what do you think of giv- ing her a party ? " " A party ? " I faltered. " Yes. Julia comes out this winter, you know. Mamma is too delicate to take on her own shoulders the entire brunt of the wear and tear involved, and I should like to do what I can to help. Besides, we have been married now ten years, and have accepted so many in- vitations without returning them that I am al- most ashamed to look people in the face. It was all very well not to entertain until we had an excuse, but we shall never have another excuse so good as this until Josie comes out." I will frankly confess that I have failed to ex- perience the compunctions as to looking my ac- quaintances in the face referred to by Joseph- ine. It has never occurred to me to quail in the presence of the long line of social benefac- tors who have proffered us hospitality during the last decade in the form of dinners, cotil- lons, and evening receptions. People entertain A MARRIED MAN 133 because they or their wives feel an inclination so to do, and considering that I have very often dragged myself to their festivities de- spite every inclination to remain at home, I feel that I am entitled to cry " quits " on the score of obligation. Moreover, Josephine's strictures were by no means just, as I hastened to point out to her. Surely she had not for- gotten the huge kettledrum and two smaller teas, by means of which she had killed off her entire visiting list ? Had not her sewing-cir- cle eaten us out of house and home biennially since we had plighted our troth at the altar? Then, too, in point of dinner company I was ready to challenge comparison with almost any one of my contemporaries. How often had I aroused her ire by bringing home a friend to share pot-luck without even telephon- ing to her that he was coming, so that she could send to the butcher's shop around the comer, which we patronize only in case of ex- igency, for an extra brace of chops or a head of lettuce ! At least she would bear witness to the dinner-party we ga,ve in the second year of our married life to my old chum Gorham Delany on his wedding-trip, when I maintain- ed that champagne was far more indispensable 134 THE REFLECTIONS OF than an extra girl to wait and she exactly the opposite ? " And we ended by having both," broke in Josephine, with a tragic air. " Oh, I know, Fred," she continued, " that in one sense of the wprd we have done our part, and I would not for an instant suggest giving anything big if it were not for dear Julia. It will be such a help to the child to be properly introduced to people. And though the house is small and not particularly convenient for entertaining, it can be made to look well enough now that the drawing-room ceiling has been retinted." Craftiness, thy name is woman ! It was ob- vious to me now why Josephine had seemed so eager to have that ceiling done over before we moved from the sea-side. As it happened, however, I was feeling tol- erably flush, by reason of a windfall which had left me with an extra thousand dollar bUl. Somebody had told me to buy cotton. I had done so, and sold it a month later .at a hand- some profit, and I had been trying to make up my mind for a fortnight whether to spend the proceeds of the venture in a diamond crescent for Josephine or a fur overcoat for myself. Somehow I felt that it was money to be squan- A MABRIBD MAN 135 dered ratlier than saved. Consequently I now remarked, with a sigh of resignation : " Very well, dear ; give a party if you see fit." Josephine looked successively bewildered, radiant, and finally anxious. " You know, Fred, that a party means more than two or three moulds of ice-cream with mixed cakes." Evidently she had expected a much more serious tussle, and wished to make sure that I realized what I was in for. " Have a dozen moulds, then, if necessary." " You cannot give a party nowadays for noth- ing," she added, with conscientious insistence. "Everything costs more than it is worth nowadays," I answered oracularly. " Give your party, Josephine, and I will pay the bills. Only," I added, by way of a prospective brake on extravagance, " remember that we are not millionaires." "You are a dear, kind, good, generous duck," she exclaimed, effusively, throwing her arms around my neck. " I will send for Sam Bangs to-morrow." Sam Bangs is a convenient friend of the family, a second cousin of mine, and rather a pal of Josephine's. The world at large christ- 136 THE BEFLBGTIONS OF ened him "Slam" Bangs early in life because of his rattling energy; but contact with the world in question has toned down the rattle to a conventional key and left the energy unim- paired. He has led more Germans, and been an usher at a larger number of weddings and funerals than any man of his years in town, and is consequently a social authority. Sam duly appeared in all the regalia of even- ing dress and a chrysanthemum, and smiled benignly on the project. " I shall depend on you to help me make it a success," Josephine said to him with a supplicating air ; and there- after the pair was deep in consultation for at least half a dozen evenings during the next three weeks. The married man whose wife is on the eve of giving a ball, is absolutely of no account, and colloquially speaking, his room is far more desirable than his company. He is the last person to whom anyone would think of refer- ring the various knotty problems to be solved, and they are diverse. Josephine's throes over her invitation list were simply agonizing, and, as she herself informed me after all was over, her distress of mind was intensified by the consciousness that I was of no use what- A MARRIED MAN 137 ever as an adviser. I was fortunate enough, however, to be allowed to remain within ear- shot of the arrangements, on the tacit under- standing that I was on no account to ruffle the current of conversation with my oar. Sam Bangs laid down many precepts for Jo- sephine's guidance, but first and foremost he impressed upon her the necessity of plenty of men. He declared that, no matter how ele- gant a party might be, or how admirably con- ducted, a scarcity of men would be the ruin of it ; that a party where men were abundant was pretty sure to go off with snap, and that snap was of the essence of things where entertain- ments are concerned. " But where are we to get the men ? " anx- iously inquired Josephine, who had Mrs. Wil- loughby Walton's list, which she had bor- rowed, in one hand, and a pencil in the other. " I don't know half of these." "You must invite everyone, whether you know them or not." " Certainly, if I know their fathers and mothers." " Then you will never have enough, Cousin Josephine. There is a large floating contingent of dancing men who are destitute of fathers 138 THE BEFLE0TI0N8 OF and mothers in the conventional sense ; but they, the sons, are the rank and file of every large party nowadays, and you have to ask them. Otherwise there is a dearth of partners and the girls have a stupid time." " What would they think of me if I should ask them without knowing them ? " " Most of them wouldn't think of you at all ; that's the beauty of it. They would come and dance and eat supper, and dance again and then eat supper again, without bothering their heads about you in the least. They are quite used to it, I assure you. Five out of six would not know you or Miss Julia from Adam if they were to meet you the next day. Of course, if you were going to give a very small, select affair, you could pick and choose, but in a tutti frutti you must have men, even if you have to hire them." " Then why shouldn't I give a small affair instead of a — a tuiti frutti ? " inquired my dar- ling with a pathetic gasp as though she were a drowning woman snatching at a straw. " In that case you would have to leave out half the people you do know, which might be embarrassing." "Indeed it would," said Josephine, and for A MARRIED MAN" 139 the next half-liour she endeavored to compute whether it would be more distressing to have to invite the rag, tag, and bob-tail as she called it, or be compelled to leave out half her social acquaintance. " Would it be possible, Cousin Sam ? " she pleaded. "To do what?" " Give a small dance without offending peo- ple?" " That depends on the number you feel obliged to ask." "I made an impromptu calculation the other day," she answered, ruefully, "and I don't see how I can escape from inviting six hundred in any event — and that of course with- out the extra young men you mentioned." " Forty couples are all this house will possi- bly accommodate with comfort for a german, Cousin Josephine, but you can invite any number of people to a jam." " And there are forty-three buds alone with- out counting Julia," she groaned. "I had better go in for the jam and get it over." " You can kill off everybody now, and an- other time it wiU be easier to give the smaller dance." 140 THE REFLECTIONS OF After the decision of this momentous ques- tion came the excruciating task of overhauling the invitation list. Incessantly one or the other would burst out with some such horri- fied exclamation, as " He died three years ago, strike him out," or " Mercy on us, I was nearly forgetting that Polly Flinders isn't Polly Flin- ders any longer." There was a constant bick- ering between them also on the score of admis- sibility. Sam, in the interest of the dancing phalanx, was in favor of applying the prun- ing-knife freely among the " ancient and honor- ables," as he called them, and on the other hand Josephine, from fear of giving offence, was dis- posed to include every grandmother and great- aunt in her social category. Three evenings were spent in this manner before the last let- ter in the alphabet was reached, and my dar- ling was able to smile again. Even then it was a little ghost of a smile, accompanied by the disheartened utterance that she fully ex- pected to discover, after the invitations had been issued, that she had omitted her dearest friends and made many mortal enemies. When the invitation list was out of the way the parquet floor became Josephine's crown- ing concern. The fact that the drawing-room A MARRIED MAN 141 happened to have a parquet floor had been, as I subsequently discovered, a constant spur to her to give a party ever since our mar- riage. For what can equal for dancing a care- fully oiled floor ? What, indeed ! And what is more detestable than one out of condition ? Josephine fancied that she had merely to re- move the rug and apply a little furniture pol- ish to the surface of hers in order to render it a terpsichorean paradise. How often are our most confident expectations blighted ! For a fortnight she was racked by the alter- nate consciousness that her paradise was so slippery as to be dangerous to life and limb, or so sticky as to dishearten the least exacting of waltzers. Hour after hour housemaids, with cloths bundled about their feet, rubbed it with judiciously moistened mops, and hour after hour experienced furniture polishers treated it with lubricating liquids, until the house smelt like a combined chemist's and sign-painter's establishment; and even the willing Sam Bangs had grown weary in pirou- etting over it with Josephine in order to de- cide whether it was just right. When at last Sam pronounced solemnly that it was perfect, Josephine looked as though she would cry 142 THE REFLECTIONS OF with rapture ; but she restrained her tears until the following day, when she caught sight of me standing in the middle of it, fresh from the street in my muddy boots, as she graphi- cally described the situation. As for Sam Bangs, he was completely in his element ; that is to say, he was in and out of our house half a dozen times in the course of every twenty-four hours — ringing the door-bell before breakfast, and as likely as not at night just when I was on the point of turning out the gas and thanking my lucky stars that I had seen the last of him for that day at least. The household was up in arms, and the house in the possession of dressmakers and small mechanics. The hall was full of camp-stools. One afternoon, when I chanced to return home earlier than usual, there was a scurrying exodus from my dressing-room of Julia in dis- habille and two dressmakers, who shrieked as they fled, like the squawking sheldrake of the lake. I had interrupted my sister-in-law in the process of being fitted to the waist of her new ball-dress. Afflicting days these for a married man ! Although Josephine explained that a cloth was thrown over the floor of my dressing-room every morning, and that the A MARRIED MAR 143 housemaid had explicit orders to tidy up as soon as the dressmakers had departed, I picked up a dozen needles and three score pins in the course of their stay, and trod the carpet in perpetual fear of lockjaw. The eventful day arrived at last. Early in the afternoon Josephine introduced me to a caterer of predatory mien, who demanded the key of my wine-cellar and proceeded to sup- plement the dozens of champagne which were being iced in tubs with the few bottles of choice Madeira, brandy, and port which I had collected from time to time with a view to opening them when I and they had grown mellow with age. When I entered the draw- ing-room at ten o'clock, I felt some doubts as to whether Sam Bangs or I was the proprietor of the establishment. These vanished com- pletely after he insisted on reopening the win- dows, which I had closed, on the plea that, unless the mercury were detained in close proximity to the freezing-point until the guests arrived, the heat would be unendurable later, a proposition which Josephine and Julia supported so vigorously that I turned up the collar of my dress-coat and abandoned the field to my rival. He was already attended 144 TEE BEFLEOTIONS OF by a corps of magnificent youths who were to officiate as ushers. Several of these did me the honor to exchange a few words with me, but the most of them ignored my presence, or rather tolerated it with much the same air of toplofty unconcern with which they put up with the presence of the waiters and the mu- sicians — nuisances, so to speak, but under the cu-cumstances not to be got rid of. Happen- ing to filch a tinsel rose from the basket on the mantel-piece containing the favors for the german, intending to save it for little Winona, I quailed before the frosty gaze of one of these dragons of the ball-room, who informed me that they were not to be taken until later in the evening. Moreover I replaced it with an apology so humble that he unbent himself so far as to add that, if everyone were to follow my example, the favors would be exhausted before the german began. Five minutes after- ward I heard him inquire of Sam Bangs who that old cock was, and I cherish, among the few delightful memories of the evening, the sickly expression of his features consequent upon the answer of his chief. In much the same fashion as the tide ad- vances up a shingly beach, do the guests ai- A MARRIED MAN . 145 rive at a large party. A preKminary straggler or two put in an appearance, then a batch of three or four ; there is a lull, followed by a file of stragglers, and more frequent batches ; another lull, and of a sudden a continuous stream which swells and subdivides until it loses itself in a seething, murmuring con- course which hui'ls itself upon the bewildered hostess and is sucked back by the undertow. Dazed by innumerable greetings and hand- shakings, I merely try to keep steadily in mind Josephine's strict injunction that I am to look out for the girls who are left stranded without a soul to speak to them, and to relieve men who have been too long in the society of any one woman. As I worm my way through the crowded rooms I feel myself to be a con- glomeration of the good Samaritan and an am- ateur detective. From time to time an emis- sary recalls me to the side of Josephine to receive whispered instructions to restrain the children from displaying themselves at the head of the staircase in their nightgowns, or to caution the caterer not to let salt get into the ice-cream. She is nervous and excited, and informs me with delight three separate times that the Eeverend Bradley Mason, our 10 146 THE REFLECTIONS OF spiritual adviser, and Doctor Henry Meredith, the specialist on nervous diseases, are among our guests. " You know, Fred, that it is the rarest thing to see either of them at a party, and I con- sider it a great compliment that they should have made an exception in our favor." It seems as though every friend and ac- quaintance whom I possess has made an ex- ception in our favor, for the rooms are per- spiringly crowded. Mrs. Gregory Scott, and Mrs. Willoughby Walton, and Mrs. Guy Sloane arrive later than ever, and their advent is scarcely less notable than a decade ago, when they were fresh and youthful as the half dozen younger married women threatening to usui'p their places. Youths who are, figura- tively speaking, babes in arms, dance attend- ance on them, and Mrs. Walton's bosom is banked with the same profusion of flowers. Mrs. Guy drops me a courtesy and bends upon me a glance of melancholy, yet tender reproach which seems to inquire why I have failed to visit her for three years. Is it verily three years siace I have called upon her ? I blush for the rapid flight of time. Another emis- sary touches my shoulder and emits the man- A MARRIED MAN ' 147 date that my wife is waiting for me. I find Josepliine in a fever of nervous tension over the fact' that supper has been ready for ten minutes, aud that she has been unable to find me to tell me that I am to lead the way with Mrs. Cadwallader Kean. " Why doesn't Sam Bangs lead the way ? " I inquire, gravely. " He is running this thing." My darling opens her eyes in bewildered astonishment at my pleasantry. Then, with a little toss of her head, which implies that she has no time to waste over such nonsense, she gives me a gentle push, saying : "Don't dawdle, Fred; there she is, stand- ing exactly in the direction where I am look- ing." I hie me to the wrinkled sexagenarian in question. Her husband had been one of those admirably attractive men who manage to drink themselves to death early in life and yet leave behind them a lustre of fashionable importance which gilds their posterity. It is not easy to state in terms why Mrs. Cadwal- lader is entitled to precedence, yet everyone knows that she is, and she takes my arm as though she were accustomed to the attention. 148 THE REFLECTIONS OF Our exit toward the supper-room is the signal for a general stampede thither. Young men and old men, like an army of black ants, infest the tables and struggle fiercely for hot bouil- lon, raw oysters, chicken-salad, lobster cro- quettes, filet of beef, champagne, ice-cream, rolls, napkins, and ice-water. I behold a judge of the Supreme Court foiled in an at- tempt to capture a remaining sweet-bread by a youth barely out of his teens, who is forag- ing for his rose-bud partner. Through a sea of black coats and jostling elbows and surging beards and mustaches I catch sight of our diminutive but beloved pastor wedged in be- tween two rowing men from the University, who seem to be determined that he shall never reach shore with the plate of ice-cream which he is clutching like a vice. I notice, too, Dr. Meredith partaking freely of most of the arti- cles of diet against which his professional fulminations are uttered. And ever and anon I am recalled to the side of my darling, who is beset by a hundred fears. Why are there not plenty of rolls ? Where are the napkins ? Why do the waiters neglect to offer Apol- linaris water to the ladies in accordance with her positive orders ? It is I who am in her A MARRIED MAN 149 sernce and at her beck and call now, for Sam has yielded to temptation and established himseK with his Dulcinea del Toboso in the only cubby-hole in the house adapted for two. Little by little the press diminishes, until only the few who are faia to eat and drink in peace are left in the supper-room. I notice Gil- lespie Gore sampling my Madeira and press- ing it upon the attention of discriminating pals. The musicians are tuning their instru- ments and a few people (thank goodness !) are going home. Josephine's parquet floor is over- run by a bevy of gilded youths contending for camp-stools, and out of stormy chaos the ger- man forms itself at last under the supervision of Sam, who has been dragged from his cubby- hole. Three hours of strenuous dancing fol- low, during which I flit restlessly from pillar to post, from the benches where the matrons are dozing with one eye open on their daugh- ters to the supper-room where perpetual hot ducks and my Madeira still detain Gillespie Gore and company, and where the dancing men without mothers and fathers quaff goblets galore of champagne after each figure of the thirst-provoking dance. I am yearning to go to bed, and I recaU the answer of the host in 150 THE REFLECTIONS OF Punch, to whom the bored spirit at his side, leaning against the wall, whispered, " This is jolly stupid; I say, let's go home." — "Would to heaven I could, but I can't, for it's my house ! " One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning, and now it is a quarter of four. I peep behind a curtain and ruminantly scan the glimmering east. At last the waltzers, who have grown more exuberant with every hour, show signs of cessation. Chaperones, exhaust- ed in patience, rouse themselves from their somnolence and exercise authority over their charges. Mrs. Cadwallader Kean, drawing her old-lace shawl around her shoulders with dig- nified impressiveness, announces that it is time for her daughter to go home. Even Sam, the inexhaustible and inextinguishable, admits that the german is at an end, and that there is to be only one final polka to wind up with. Oh, the joy and rapture of that last polka ! Maidens on the point of departure tear them- selves free from the maternal grasp at the invitation of the first partner who offers his hand and fall into the delicious rhythm of the swinging quickstep, and the old war-horses who have been looking forward to it aU the A MARRIED MAN 151 evening, fling themselves into the maddening whirl with almost the abandon of the cancan. Who can be indifferent to plenty of room and a perfect floor at four o'clock in the morning when you are conscious that in five minutes more all will be over and you will be face to face with the cold, pale mom and reproachful stars ? There is a dash and a go to it which carries away the least frivolous and the least elastic, so that they speed round with the verve and exaltation of twenty-one. There are just enough remaining, and they the cream of the dancers. The gayety and enthusiasm of the rout recall from the supper-room the last of the old stagers and lure from the cubby-hole Mrs. Gregory Scott and the boy of nineteen who is her favorite slave at the moment. It is the fag end of the evening, the lees of the entertainment by means of which another of the rose-bud garden of girls has been intro- duced to the great world. She, dear child, the sweet sister-in-law of the house, is spin- ning radiantly round the room with her hand resting on the shoulder of one of the youths without parents, who has claimed her for this last polka of all. My feet beat time and my pulses respond to the well-remembered meas- 152 REFLECTIONS OF A MARRIED MAN ure, and suddenly in an acme of transport I pounce upon and possess myself of Josephine and precipitate her into the madcap whirl. Fast and faster we reYolve, rejoicing in our ec- stasy and fearful at every seeming pause in the music that the end has come. It is demoniac, but glorious. And all at once, at the inspira- tion of Mrs. Willoughby Walton, who is danc- ing madly with Sam Bangs, everyone begins to chant with delirious voices the air and ca- dence of the entrancing polka. The ecstasy is at its height ; the madness of the madcaps is at the climax. On and on, round and round, faster and faster, we spin, and then of a sud- den the music throbs and bounds, rises and screeches, vibrates wildly, falls and ceases; the melody from half a hundred throats ex- pires in a groan of regret, and Josephine's party is over. The lady in the house across the way, the mother of the seven girls, is dead. A week ago she was carried to the cemetery and her husband has begun life again in a sable hat and gloves. He walks bravely arm in arm vdth the eldest of his tall daughters, with one of the others on either side. I turn away from the window with a iump in my throat. My heart bleeds for him, and I cannot help thinking that it might have been Josephine. We look into each other's eyes, conscious of the same thought. Sooner or later death, the inevitable, will come to rob me of her or her of me. The spinster falls asleep and all is over. She is respectfully mourned ; her little charities cease, her account with her board- ing-house keeper is closed, and her last instruc- tions regarding her parrot are respected. But when a wife and mother dies all nature sobs. And yet men marry again ; men and women ]54 THE REFLECTIONS OF also. One of my great-grandfathers took un- to himself four wives, and Josephine's ma- ternal grandmother had three husbands. Jo- sephine, who knows Eobert Browning's " Any Wife to Ajiy Husband" by rote, pretends that if she were to be taken away I Avould marry again, but I know she is no less sure in her secret soul that I would remain a widower to the end than she is sure of being faithful herself in case I should be the first to go. We have often pondered why it is that the one who is left behind to mourn can so quickly stifle the old love. To be sure, we have been told that in heaven there will be no marrying or giving in marriage, but, as Josephine says, this would scarcely reconcile the woman who has gone before in the faith of an everlasting love to sharing it with another. Nevertheless here is the example of her grand- mother with three husbands and my great- grandfather with his four wives staring us in the face. Are we to argue that our ancestors loved less truly and deeply than we ? Josephine insists that this is so, and I am disposed to agree with her. If, indeed, we are to live again on the farther side of the tomb, what will it profit us unless we can see and A MARRIED MAN 155 know those whom we have loved here ? Life without consciousness of this world's associa- tions would be to all intents and purposes an- nihilation. If I am to be separated forever from Josephine by death, what boots it to me whether I shall rise at the last trump a winged angel with the power of worship, or be re- solved into the elemental clod from which my bones were fashioned ? "And yet," said Josephine to me one day when we were discussing the matter, as we occasionally do, " supposing I had died when the children were mere tots, and you had been left to struggle through life alone, it would really have been the most sensible thing, after all, for you to marry again, if only to provide my darlings with a mother. It would have been frightfully lonely for you, Fred ; you would never have been able to stand it. But if I had known what was going on I could never have forgiven you — never. I should have hated you and her. You are mine for eteitiity, and I wish the whole of you or none at all." The mystery of mysteries, death! In the twinkling of an eye we shall cease to rise, and dress, and eat, and walk, and sleep, and we 156 THE REFLECTIONS OF shall be laid in the ground where the bones of our ancestors lie wrestling with decay. It may be that one of us wiU. be called to-mor- row, and, like the wife and mother across the way, leave the other to walk alone ; and it may be that we shall walk side by side until we are old, and wrinkled, and bald, and paralysis or cancer carries us off within six months of each other. Yet not for a single moment are we se- cure from the touch of the great destroyer, who may to-day divide our hearts as with a shear. The priest kneeling at the altar with his face to the sky smiles at death ; he knows not the terror of the thought which haunts us because we are so happy. Many a time, when our thoughts have this way tended, have we endeavored to forecast the topography of the future state, undaunted by the fact that the wisest men and women of past generations, both married and single, have bent their wits upon the problem in vain. Yet here we encounter some progress, for even Josephine, with her predilection for magnifi- cent effects, has ceased to contend that the immortal spirit is likely to be trammelled by pearly gates and the manipulation of a harp. Similarly, we put aside as no longer germane A MARRIED MAN 157 to tlie issue the quandary, which harassed our ancestors, as to how the amplitude of the heavens will afford seating capacities for the myriad souls whom a previous condition of rectitude has entitled to enter grace ; an archi- tectural feat calculated to palsy the imagination even of those enthusiasts who insist that the huge population of India's coral strand, to say nothing of the sparse aborigines of Greenland's icy mountains, are to be omitted from the com- putation. In spite, too, of the fulminations of a certain portion of the clergy, we are unable to screw our convictions up to a belief in the traditional hell which was alike the terror and the solace of bygone generations. We are op- pressed by the fear neither of a bottomless pit nor of interminable fixes of brimstone. A willingness to torture seems to us too utterly inconsistent with the attributes of the divinity who brings to pass the sunsets and inspires the human soul with the sublimities of poetry and art. "It would be immensely interesting, though," said Josephine one day, " if we only could catch just a little glimpse of the future. I feel as you do, Fred, that the idea of eternal torment is old-fashioned, and that very few 158 THE REFLECTIONS OF really believe in it, whatever they may say with their lips ; but, on the other hand, I can't help feeling that there will be some sort of distinc- tion between the sheep and the goats, and that people who have been horribly wicked will not be quite on a par with the righteous." " I will admit," said I, " that there was a certain gorgeous satisfaction for our ancestors in the old hope that those who did not toe the mark would be held up to a sulphurous blaze on fiery pitchforks, and I can almost envy the complacency of the poor suffering souls to-day who are being buoyed through life by the fer- vent expectation that the people who have been well to do and happy in the present world will be tormented in the next in order to make things even, and that they themselves will be proportionately indemnified for their terrestrial' misery." " And the trouble is, Fred, that we who be- lieve that God is love, and consequently dis- miss the old conceits as too terrible, just as we no longer bum folk as witches and hang them for petty larceny, are left without the comfort of a definite theory on the subject of what will happen to other people, and are also unable to entertain physical fears on our own account. A MARRIED MAN 159 It seems to me that there ought to be a separ- ate place in the other world for pretty good people, those who are neither saintly on the one hand, nor criminals nor detestably selfish or malicious on the other. It would haye to be much the largest place, for after all we are most of us pretty good. There are a few saints and a good many miserable sinners, but the most of the people we know. are pretty good." " And would you limit your limbo to people we know, my dear ? " I inquired. " Are you canvassing in the interest of a celestial four hundred?" " Don't be blasphemous, Fred. It would necessarily include the greater portion of the people we know, because the greater portion of the people we know are of just that kind, people whose faults, though numerous enough and discouraging enough, as we are painfully aware in our own cases, don't seem exactly to merit everlasting torture. Just think how many people there are in the world like you and me, who would be utterly incapable of committing a murder, or robbing a bank, or putting sand in sugar, or telling downright lies, or wantonly slandering their neighbors; 160 THE BEFLEOTIONS OF people who have courteous maimers, and tem- pers tolerably imder control, and a decided sympathy with culture, and a disposition to contribute their mites to the cause of philan- thropy ; people who would cut their right hands oflf rather than dispute a will becavise they hadn't received what they expected, or live beyond their incomes, or violate a confi- dence ; people who are not geniuses and will never set the world afire, and who, though they don't understand exactly why they have been created, wish to live as long as possible and have not the least desire to die, and who go on from year to year without seeming to accomplish very much, and yet trying — -trying — trying to understand what God expects of them. For we do try, don't we, Fred ? " "Indeed you do, my dear. The only trouble is that, though I might possibly be included in the category of the pretty good, you would rank as a saint." "Wliich only shows how little you really know me," she answered, with a sigh. " Un- fortunately, the recording angel sees me with very different eyes, and knows that I am far from saintly." My darling bent her glance upon space for a moment with a dejected little A MARRIED MAN 161 air, as though she were appalled by the reali- zation of her imperfections, then she turned to me aid said, " Of course anyone would be glad to be a saint ; and undoubtedly, if one were a saint, one would like especially to be with saintly people ; but the most depressing thing of all in a certain way is that the society of the pretty good people is so attractive to me, that I am confident I should be very misera- ble if I were to be separated from them alto- gether." "From your own true love, for instance?" " Yes, from my own true love, alas ! For I im forced to admit, Fred, that, though you are adorable at times, you are only pretty good." She added, as she threw her arms around my neck, " Only think how terrible it would be for me if you loere a saint and I so full of shortcomings ! " A place hereafter for pretty good people ! I have often recalled since that notion of Jo- sephine's as an eminently pertinent suggestion. Lord Bacon well said that " he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or of mischief." The married man who is chary of drinking tea from his 11 162 THE BEFLEGTIONS OF saucer and ambitious to send his sons to col- lege, is unapt to expose himself to obloquy for the sake of his convictions, nor is his wife fain to become a St. Theresa. Less likely, on the other hand, is either to stoop to flagrant vices. As I have already specified, I renounced on the day I wedded Josephine even the hope of stopping a runaway horse, and I am free to admit that I dismissed forever at the same time a sneaking intention of presuming on my hitherto unblemished reputation to become some day a foot-pad in disguise. What, pray, is there to prevent Sam Bangs, for instance, 1 was going to say — but even he has bowed his neck at last to the matrimonial yoke at the be- hest of the Dulcinea with whom he retired to the cubby-hole at Josephine's party ; so let me invoke for my argument the traditional Tom, Dick, and Harry of fiction, and ask again what is there to prevent any of these single gentle- men from putting Paris green in the porridge of his dearest foe, or from hieing to the North Pole in the cause of glacial science? The world lies open before them. They are free to become hardened villains of the deepest dye, or benefactors of their day and genera- tion. But for Josephine and for me the path A MARRIED MAN 163 of life is straight and narrow. Has not my darling, with her own fair hands, daily to but- ter rolls for the little ones to take to school, to make sure that the buttons which support their gallowses are not lacking, and to keep a watchful eye on the length of their hair? Have I not in my turn to remember to bring home the money for that everlasting sewing- woman, whether I have earned it or not, and to foster a nostril perpetually on the scent of sewer-gas ? " Where, O where are the visions of morning Fresh as the dews of our prime ? Gone like tenants who quit without warning Down the back entry of time." "And have you ever thought, Fred," said Josephine to me one day, " that we suddenly awake at forty and realize that we are just the sort of people we intended not to be ? I for one — and I am very sure that you once felt the same — cherished such glorious visions and plans as a girl of what I was gciing to make of my life, and yet here I am living along just like everybody else, bringing up children, and going to kettledrums, and taking a spasmodic interest in the arrangement of tenement-houses, 164 THE BEFLE0TI0N8 OF and planning for winter and summer clothes, no better, and I dare say no worse, than the most of my neighbors." " Eppur si muove," I murmured encourag- ingly. " I could have told once what that meant," said she, with a mournful smile. " I used to know quite a little Italian." " ' And still it moves,' the world moves. It was Galileo who made the remark under cir- cumstances even more depressing than ours," I answered. " There is a certain comfort in the reflection that we pretty good people have very different ideas from the pretty good people who lived before we were bom. As you said the other day, we no longer burn witches, and yet even the people who passed for saints two centuries ago took a hand in that. Perhaps with the same ratio of improvement we shall, in another two hundred years, cease to be at the mercy of the reporter, the saleslady, and the political striker. I flatter myself that we are a little more liberal, a little truer-hearted, a little wiser than our progenitors, just as our children are likely to be an improvement on us if pretty good people are not swept away in the deluge of democracy. How interesting it A MARRIED MAN 165 would be if we could take a peep ahead and know what the world will be doing two hun- dred years hence ; or half a century even ! Think of it, my dear, pretty good people will probably be flying and doing all sorts of amaz- ing things which will make our boasted prog- ress seem a mere puppet show," I added, as I drew my darling's head down upon my shoulder and held her closely. "Fancy," said Josephine, "being able to skim like a bird ! It would be glorious, wouldn't it ? Perhaps the dear children will live to cross the ocean on a genuine air- tamer." She was silent for a few moments, lost in rapt reflection, then looking up into my face with - >vistful tenderness, she whispered, "I only hope, Fred, that they will be as happy as we have been." THE END. ROBERT GRANT'S BOOKS. The Opinions of a Philosopher. A Sequel to the Reflections of a Married Man. With numerous Illustrations by C. S. Reinhart and W, To Smedley. i2mo, $i.oo. CHARLES 5CRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers. An unusually large circle of eager readers will be found waiting for Robert Grant's " Opinions of a Philosopher " ; for Mr. Grant's " Reflections of a Married Man," to which this is a sequel, appealed to and made friends of a larger public than any book of its class in recent years. And it is a class which, though small in number, has come closest to every man's sympathies, and his experience both grave and comic. Every one who remembers at how many points, both tender and laughable, the story of Fred and Josephine's young married life in the " Reflections " touched his own, will be anxious to follow the couple through their middle life in the "Opinions" — told with a mixture of charm and humor that make the book stand worthily on the shelf that has the "Reveries of a Bachelor" at one end and " Rudder Grange" at the other, while itself more "modern" than either. FOURTEENTH THOUSAND. The Reflections of a Married Man. i2mo, paper, 50 cents ; cloth, $1.00. Independent, — " It sparkles with Mr. Grant's pleasant wit." Boston Advertiser. — " A delicious vein of humor runs through his narrative, and, withal, he writes with a rare knowledge of woman and her ways." Providence Journal. — " It reads like an autobiography, so simple, fresh, and natural it is, and Mr. Grant's conception and achievement are alike successful." Congregationalisi.—'^'ll is so true — half seriously, half comically true — to actual life that every married reader will recognize himself and his wife repeatedly." Chicago Evening Post. — "Throughout the book the practical and poetical, the grave and the gay, the humorous and the pathetic are intermingled in a fashion that is wholly true to life.'* Chicago Dial. — " It is altogether kindly, and playful, and wholesome. If one would class it he would put it on the shelf with *Prue and I' and the 'Reveries of a 1 bachelor.' " ROBERT GRANT'S BOOKS. Face to Face. i2mo, paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.25. Buffalo Express. — "This is a well-told story, the interest of which turns upon a game of cross purposes between an accomplished English girl, posing as a free and easy American Daisy Miller, and an American gentleman, somewhat given to aping the manners of the EngUsh." Boston Traveller, — " A story of very unusual power. Its realistic pictures of summer life at Newport and Lenox are ^written from the inside' so to speak, and from this graphic panorama the story develops into a profound and thouj^htful presentation of the social problem of the day — the war of labor and capital; while the love story run- ning through it is intense and absorbing." TWO BOOKS F^OR BOVS. Jack Hall ; Or, The School-Days of an American Boy. Illustrated by Francis G. Attwood. i2mo, $1.25. Boston 7'ranscript, — " A capital story for boys. It reminds one here and there of * Tom Brown.' Jack Hall runs over with vitality, gets into no end of scrapes, but is manly withal, courageous, and truthful." Chicago Times,— "It is a lively, rattling, breezy story of school life in this country written by one who knows all about its ways, its snowball fights, its baseball matches, its pleasures and its perplexities, its glorious excitements, its rivalries and its chilling disappointments." Jack in the Bush ; Or, a Summer on a Salmon River. Illustrated by F. T. Merrill. i2mo, $1.25. Pittsburg Press. — " A racy and instructive narrative of a six weeks' sojourn on a salmon river in Canada ; and the excitement of canooing through the rapids, the exhilara- ting sport of salmon fishing, the novelty of camp life in the wild country, with some adventures with bears and a half breed thrown in by way of additional seasoning* make up a book which cannot fail to delight the hearts of boys who are fond of ad- ventures, as well as interest those who can tell from experience how true to nature the story is." For sale by all booksellers or sent., post-paid, on receipt o/ price by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 743-745 Broadway, New York.