hen he returns at night; he is to them the strange
man who sits at the head of the table once a week and carves the Sunday
joint. It is well for them if they have a mother who possesses gifts
of government, sympathy, and patient comprehension, for it is clear
that they have no father. He gets a living, and perhaps in time an
ample living; but does he live?

It may be said that this picture is exaggerated; on the contrary, I
think it is under-estimated. I have myself known men whose average
daily absence from 'home' is twelve hours; they disappear by the eight
o'clock morning train, and in times of special business pressure it is
not far from midnight when they return. The trains, cabs, and public
vehicles of London convey, day by day, one million three hundred
thousand of these homeless men to their employments in the city. Here
and there a wise man may be found who resents this tyranny of
suburbanism. I know a young business man, who also chances to possess
domestic instincts, for whom suburbanism grew so intolerable that he
took a house in the very heart of London, that he might lunch and dine
with his wife at his own table without neglecting his business
interests. He was a wise man, but he is the only one I know. Counting
the time passed at luncheon and dinner, the later departure in the
morning, and the earlier arrival at night, he is the clear gainer, day
by day, of three to four hours of domestic intercourse. At the end of
the week he has thus added to the credit of his family life
four-and-twenty hours; at the end of a year he has enjoyed more than
fifty full days of domestic intercourse which would have been forfeited
had he continued to live at Surbiton. He has also saved money, for
though the rent he pays in Central London is more than the rent he paid
at Surbiton, yet he has saved the expense of his season-ticket,
lunches, and occasional dinners at a club or restaurant, and cabs to
Waterloo when he was pressed for time. But it is quite vain to urge
such considerations on the average man of business. He would tell you
frankly that nothing would induce him to live in a house within a
stone's-throw of Leicester Square, although it is a far better built
and more comfortable house than the gimcrack villa which he rents at
Surbiton. The gain in domestic intercourse would not attract him, for
he has long ago lost taste for it; and the privilege of lunching with
his family would repel him, for he is dee