It must not be inferred that the Professor’s domestic relations were defective:  they were in fact so complete that it was almost impossible to get away from them.  It is the happy husbands who are really in bondage; the little rift within the lute is often a passage to freedom.  Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he had sought in it; a comfortable lining to life.  The impossibility of rising to sentimental crises had made him scrupulously careful not to shirk the practical obligations of the bond.  He took as it were a sociological view of his case, and modestly regarded himself as a brick in that foundation on which the state is supposed to rest.  Perhaps if Mrs. Linyard had cared about entomology, or had taken sides in the war over the transmission of acquired characteristics, he might have had a less impersonal notion of marriage; but he was unconscious of any deficiency in their relation, and if consulted would probably have declared that he didn’t want any woman bothering with his beetles.  His real life had always lain in the universe of thought, in that enchanted region which, to those who have lingered there, comes to have so much more colour and substance than the painted curtain hanging before it.  The Professor’s particular veil of Maia was a narrow strip of homespun woven in a monotonous pattern; but he had only to lift it to step into an empire.

This unseen universe was thronged with the most seductive shapes:  the Professor moved Sultan-like through a seraglio of ideas.  But of all the lovely apparitions that wove their spells about him, none had ever worn quite so persuasive an aspect as this latest favourite.  For the others were mostly rather grave companions, serious-minded and elevating enough to have passed muster in a Ladies’ Debating Club; but this new fancy of the Professor’s was simply one embodied laugh.  It was, in other words, the smile of relaxation at the end of a long day’s toil:  the flash of irony that the laborious mind projects, irresistibly, over labour conscientiously performed.  The Professor had always been a hard worker.  If he was an indulgent friend to his ideas, he was also a stern task-master to them.  For, in addition to their other duties, they had to support his family:  to pay the butcher and baker, and provide for Jack’s schooling and Millicent’s dresses.  The Professor’s household was a modest one, yet it tasked his ideas to keep it up to his wife’s standard.  Mrs. Linyard was not an exacting wife, and she took enough pride in her husband’s attainments to pay for her honours by turning Millicent’s dresses and darning Jack’s socks, and going to the College receptions year after year in the same black silk with shiny seams.  It consoled her to see an occasional mention of Professor Linyard’s remarkable monograph on the Ethical Reactions of the Infusoria, or an allusion to his investigations into the Unconscious Cerebration of the Amoeba.