Henry was not happy.  At times it seemed to him that he really wished that he and Sylvia had never met with this good-fortune.  Once he turned on Sidney Meeks with a fierce rejoinder, when Sidney had repeated the sarcasm which he loved to roll beneath his tongue like a honeyed morsel, that if he did not want his good-fortune it was the easiest thing in the world to relinquish it.

“It ain’t,” said Henry; “and what’s more, you know it ain’t.  Sylvia don’t want to give it up, and I ain’t going to ask her.  You know I can’t get rid of it, but it’s true what I say:  when good things are so long coming they get sour, like most things that are kept too long.  What’s the use of a present your hands are too cramped to hold?”

Sidney looked gravely at Henry, who had aged considerably during the last few weeks.  “Well, I am ready to admit,” he said, “that sometimes the mills of the gods grind so slow and small that the relish is out of things when you get them.  I’m willing to admit that if I had to-day what I once thought I couldn’t live without, I’d give up beat.  Once I thought I’d like to have the biggest law practice of any lawyer in the State.  If I had it now I’d be ready to throw it all up.  It would come too late.  Now I’d think it was more bother than it was worth.  How’d I make my wines and get any comfort out of life?  Yes, I guess it’s true, Henry, when Providence is overlong in giving a man what he wants, it contrives somehow to suck the sweetness out of what he gets, though he may not know it, and when what he thought he wanted does come to him it is like a bee trying to make honey out of a flower that doesn’t hold any.  Why don’t you go back to the shop, Henry, and have done with it?”

“Sylvia—­” began Henry.

But Sidney cut in.  “If you haven’t found out,” said he, “that in the long-run doing what is best for yourself is doing what’s best for the people who love you best, you haven’t found out much.”

“I don’t know,” Henry said, in a puzzled, weary way.  “Sometimes it seems to me I can’t keep on living the way I am living, and live at all; and then I don’t know.”

“I know,” said Sidney.  “Get back to your tracks.”

“Sylvia would feel all cut up over it.  She wouldn’t understand.”

“Of course she wouldn’t understand, but women always end in settling down to things they don’t understand, when they get it through their heads it’s got to be, and being just as contented, unless they’re the kind who fetch up in lunatic asylums, and Sylvia isn’t that kind.  The inevitable may be a hard pill for her to swallow, but it will never stick in her throat.”

Henry shook his head doubtfully.  He had been thinking it over since.  He had thought of it a good deal after dinner that day, as he sat with the unread book in his lap.  Sylvia’s remarks about Rose diverted his attention, then he began thinking again.  Sylvia watched him furtively as she sewed.  “You ain’t reading that book at all,” she said.  “I have been watching you, and you ’ain’t turned a single page since I spoke last.”