“Poor boy!” she sighed.  “You’re tired out!  No; don’t come down—­in those clothes!”

* * * * *

I laughed a hollow laugh when she had gone.  Really there was something humorous about it all.  What was the use even of trying?  I did not seem even to belong in my own house unless my clothes matched the wall paper!  I lit cigarette after cigarette, staring blankly at my silk pajamas laid out on the bed.

I could not change things!  It was too late.  I had brought up my son and daughters to live in a certain kind of way, had taught them that luxuries were necessities, had neglected them—­had ruined them perhaps; but I had no moral right now to annihilate that life—­and their mother’s—­without their consent.  They might be poor things; but, after all, they were my own.  They were free, white and twenty-one.  And I knew they would simply think me mad!

I had a fixed place in a complicated system, with responsibilities and duties I was morally bound to recognize.  I could not chuck the whole business without doing a great deal of harm.  My life was not so simple as all that.  Any change—­if it could be accomplished at all—­would have to be a gradual one and be brought about largely by persuasion.  Could it be accomplished?

It now seemed insuperably difficult.  I was bound to the wheel—­and the habits of a lifetime, the moral pressure of my wife and children, the example of society, and the force of superficial public opinion and expectation were spinning it round and round in the direction of least resistance.  As well attempt to alter my course as to steer a locomotive off the track!  I could not ditch the locomotive, for I had a trainload of passengers!  And yet—­

I groaned and buried my face in my hands.  I—­successful?  Yes, success had been mine; but success was failure—­naught else—­failure, absolute and unmitigated!  I had lost my wife and family, and my home had become the resort of a crew of empty-headed coxcombs.

I wondered whether they were gone.  I looked at the clock.  It was half-past twelve—­Sunday morning.  I opened my bedroom door and crept downstairs.  No; they were not gone—­they had merely moved on to supper.

My library was in the front of the house, across the hall from the drawing room, and I went in there and sank into an armchair by the fire.  The bridge party was making a great to-do and its strident laughter floated up from below.  By contrast the quiet library seemed a haven of refuge.  Here were the books I might have read—­which might have been my friends.  Poor fool that I was!

I put out my hand and took down the first it encountered—­John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  It was a funny old volume—­a priceless early edition given me by a grateful client whom I had extricated from some embarrassment.  I had never read it, but I knew its general trend.  It was about some imaginary miserable who, like myself, wanted to do things differently.  I took a cigar out of my pocket, lit it and, opening the book haphazard, glanced over the pages in a desultory fashion.