And still I went back to Higgleston. There seemed nothing else to do. I think I deceived myself with the notion that there was something in Tommy's resistance to a more acceptable destiny, that could be resolved and dissipated by the proper stimulus. But I knew, in fact, that he and Higgleston suited one another admirably. To my husband, that he should keep a clothing store in a town of five thousand inhabitants was part of the great natural causation. The single change to which our condition was liable was that the business might take a turn which would enable us to move out of the store into a house of our own. It had not occurred to Tommy to take a turn himself. The Men's Tailors and Outfitters lay like most business in Higgleston, in the back water, rocking at times in the wake of the world traffic, but never moving with it. There was a vague notion of progress abroad which resulted in our going through the motions of the main current. The Live Business Men organized a Board of Trade and rented a room to hold meetings in, but I do not remember that when they had met, anything came of it. The great tides of trade went about the world and our little fleet rocked up and down. If I had ever had any hope that Tommy and I might out of our common stock, somehow hoist sail and make a way out of it, in that spring and summer I completely lost it. I believe Tommy thought we were perfectly happy. Considering how things turned out, I am glad to have it so; but the fact is, there was not between us so much as a common taste in furniture. In the five years of married life, our home had filled up with articles which by colour and line and unfitness jarred on every sense. Tommy had what he was pleased to call an ear for music, and if the warring discords of our furnishings could have been translated into sound he would have gone distracted with it; being as it was he bought me a fire screen for my birthday. Miss Rathbone hand-painted it for the Baptist bazaar, and Tommy had bought it at three times what we could have afforded for a suitable ornament. It was his notion of our relations that we and the Rathbones should do things like that by one another. I suppose you can find the like of that fire screen at some county fair still in Ohianna, but you will find nothing more atrocious. Tommy liked to have it sitting well out in the room where he could admire it. He would remark upon it sometimes with complacency, evenings after the store was shut up, before he sat down in his old coat and slippers to read the paper. Occasionally I read to him out of a magazine or a play I had picked up, in the intervals of which I used to catch him furtively keeping up with his newspaper out of the tail of his eye.