“You’ll be ill if you stay in the house so much. Remember you’ve had a walk twice a day for going on thirty years.” No answer. His immobility made it a positive necessity for her to get up and poke the fire vigorously, or do something with might and main. That was a thing _he_ had never tried in his life—to do something with might and main! And that was why he was stranded like this now. A man of only fifty-eight! Why, she herself—Harriet T. Mar—was fifty-nine. And just see how _she_ took hold of existence—very much as she gripped the poker. Oh, it was a trial living in the same house, and all day long in the same room with a “logy” man! He was more sodden with failure every day he lived. Misfortune acted upon him like an opiate. Ha! If she—Harriet T. Mar—were _ninety_, misfortune would sting her into action. At the mere thought she sprang up and stung her husband, or the imperturbable Mongol in the kitchen, or the gentle Hildegarde. But truth to tell, though that girl _looked_ such a tender, simple creature, it was as little rewarding to wrestle with Hildegarde as with Mar, or the stolid Chinaman. Indeed, the more the mother bustled the quieter grew the girl—not at first consciously as a form of protest, but by a process of natural reaction that was largely responsible for Hildegarde’s seeming calm to the verge of insensibility. Mrs. Mar never wholly realized how much to the mother’s exuberant energy the daughter owed her impassive air. These influences playing about sensitive people produce a curious rhythm in family life. Nathaniel Mar’s supineness made his wife seize the reins and ceaselessly whip up the horses of their car. Mrs. Mar’s frantic urging of the pace, the dust and noise and whip-cracking of her progress, produced not merely a yearning for peace in Hildegarde’s mind, but a positive physical need to simulate it. People talk much of the value of good example, forgetting that we are sometimes shown there is nothing so salutary as a bad example, since out of example is wrought not merely the impulse toward imitation, but often a passionate realization of the advantage of “another way.” There was always in the Mar house one person with an eye upon the clock—why need you wear a watch? No need for you to spur on a servant, or make example of a tardy errand boy. There was always Mrs. Mar to do these things with a swingeing efficacy. Those who live with the Mrs. Mars of the world do not realize that they owe their own reputation for sweetness largely to the caustic temper of some one else. Under Mrs. Mar’s roof you may “cultivate kindness” and not suffer for it. Away from her drastic influence, you yourself will have to apportion grace and discipline more evenly. So various is life that we have sometimes a chance of learning from people’s vices what their virtues could never so deeply have impressed. Something of this the “slow” girl arrived at.