ost frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most
wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy
when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly--she's
always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative
unimportance--it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed
so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other
people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without
meaning to--the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt
her was herself.

"As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first
weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them
as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house--something you must
never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and
be publicly amiable to because you must be just--but something you
never never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without
feeling that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all
the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained
inside.

"Then the children came--she did and does love them. She lives for them.
But they're part of herself too, you see, an essential part, and as she
can't give herself to anybody but herself, she can't give them to me
even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small
children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf--and she's the kind of
woman whose children are always six to her. And she's their mother--and
so she has her way.

"That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago.

"I'd done my job--I was President of the Commercial. And I'd made my
money, and the money still kept coming in as if it didn't make any
difference what I did with it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it
for me?

"I didn't have a home--I had a place where I ate and slept. I didn't
have a wife--I had an acquaintance who kept house for me. I had
children--at school and college. I didn't have real hobbies--I hadn't
had time for them. And I was forty-nine. All I could do was go on making
money till I died.

"Well, you changed that," his voice shook a little.

"You came and I saw and knew and took you. And I'm not sorry. Because
you've made me alive again. And I'm going to be alive now till I die.

"Funny--I was never so anxious about anything happening as I have been
about--our approachin