I have often wondered for how much of what happened to Arthur Wells the day was responsible.  There are days when the world is a place for love and play and laughter.  And then there are sinister days, when the earth is a hideous place, when even the thought of immortality is unbearable, and life itself a burden; when all that is riotous and unlawful comes forth and bares itself to the light.

This was such a day.

I am fond of my friends, but I found no pleasure in the thought of meeting them that evening.  I remembered the odious squeak in the wheels of Mrs. Dane’s chair.  I resented the way Sperry would clear his throat.  I read in the morning paper Herbert Robinson’s review of a book I had liked, and disagreed with him.  Disagreed violently.  I wanted to call him on the telephone and tell him that he was a fool.  I felt old, although I am only fifty-three, old and bitter, and tired.

With the fall of twilight, things changed somewhat.  I was more passive.  Wretchedness encompassed me, but I was not wretched.  There was violence in the air, but I was not violent.  And with a bath and my dinner clothes I put away the horrors of the day.

My wife was better, but the cook had given notice.

“There has been quarreling among the servants all day,” my wife said.  “I wish I could go and live on a desert island.”

We have no children, and my wife, for lack of other interests, finds her housekeeping an engrossing and serious matter.  She is in the habit of bringing her domestic difficulties to me when I reach home in the evenings, a habit which sometimes renders me unjustly indignant.  Most unjustly, for she has borne with me for thirty years and is known throughout the entire neighborhood as a perfect housekeeper.  I can close my eyes and find any desired article in my bedroom at any time.

We passed the Wellses’ house on our way to Mrs. Dane’s that night, and my wife commented on the dark condition of the lower floor.

“Even if they are going out,” she said, “it would add to the appearance of the street to leave a light or two burning.  But some people have no public feeling.”

I made no comment, I believe.  The Wellses were a young couple, with children, and had been known to observe that they considered the neighborhood “stodgy.”  And we had retaliated, I regret to say, in kind, but not with any real unkindness, by regarding them as interlopers.  They drove too many cars, and drove them too fast; they kept a governess and didn’t see enough of their children; and their English butler made our neat maids look commonplace.

There is generally, in every old neighborhood, some one house on which is fixed, so to speak, the community gaze, and in our case it was on the Arthur Wellses’.  It was a curious, not unfriendly staring, much I daresay like that of the old robin who sees two young wild canaries building near her.