In literary matters especially was it sought for, as invaluable. Whether he had read an author or not, he knew what to think of him. For he had in his time unwittingly lighted on books before he knew what he was doing. They had served him as fixed stars forever after; so that if he heard any writer spoken of as “advanced,” “erotic,” “socialistic,” “morbid,” “pessimistic,” “tragic,” or what not unpleasant, he knew exactly what he was like, and thereafter only read him by accident. He liked a healthy tale, preferably of love or of adventure (of detective stories he was, perhaps, fondest), and insisted upon a happy ending, for, as he very justly said, there was plenty of unhappiness in life without gratuitously adding to it, and as to “ideas,” he could get all he wanted and to spare from the papers. He deplored altogether the bad habit that literature seemed to have of seeking out situations which explored the recesses of the human spirit or of the human institution. As a plain man he felt this to be unnecessary. He himself was not conscious of having these recesses, or perhaps too conscious, knowing that if he once began to look, there would be no end to it; nor would he admit the use of staring through the plain surface of society’s arrangements. To do so, he thought, greatly endangered, if it did not altogether destroy, those simple faculties which men required for the fulfilment of the plain duties of everyday life, such as: Item, the acquisition and investment of money; item, the attendance at church and maintenance of religious faith; item, the control of wife and children; item, the serenity of nerves and digestion; item, contentment with things as they were.