rity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the
nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work.
It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of
its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his
profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding
over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving
many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods.
Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his
family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.

In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to
focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever
attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was
arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before
golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of
serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the
outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the
outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she
said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting
trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin
away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.

She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself,
and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so
many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical
"notions," the speculations of her doctor--also a lifelong friend of
her husband's--as to what Judge Emery might have become if--the doctor
spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon--"he had not
had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat
Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading _Les
Miserables_, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the
mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't
inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on
sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a
husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand
a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that
she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs.
Emery had rebuked the doctor later for