But to-day all his labors seemed not worth while. There was a sour taste in his mouth. To do the little thing with a big heart was after all nothing but a sham. His ideals, he thought, had simmered down to petty things. He was spending his time in nosing out small evil-smelling scandals and in running for a mean inferior office. He felt nauseated with himself. Worse, he felt a horrible new doubt of his wife. Mrs. Appleton had been to him the type of woman he disliked, worldly, shallow, busy with the sticks and straws; yet now there would creep in a suspicion that some of the things he had forgiven to Lena's beauty and lack of sophistication were close of kin to the older woman's more blatant materialism. Materialism was the thing Dick had not learned to associate with his own women. This radiant morning, then, he felt himself under the dominion of the grand inquisitors who invented the torture of little things. Life consisted in having slow drops of water fall on his head, one at a time. Family life was slimed with small bickerings, children were a nuisance, society a bore, and the most beautiful woman in the world defiant and uninspiring at the breakfast-table. It does not take Cleopatra long to wither the ideals. Dick began to analyze his wife, which is a dangerous thing for a man to do. If a husband wishes to preserve the lover's state of mind, he must continue to think of his wife as a single indivisible creature, not a compound of faults, virtues and charms, lest in some unlucky moment he find that the faults are the biggest ingredient. Dick, however, was thinking, and the substance of his thoughts was that this little girl, who bore his name, had her seamy side. Up to now, if he noticed a defect, he instantly and chivalrously put it out of his mind, but now certain doubts had knocked so long that by sheer persistence they forced an entrance. Lena, who began by being a sweet, innocent, much-enduring little thing, now that he knew her more and more intimately, was less and less the creature he imagined. To the world in general she was still the big-eyed ingenue, learning to take her place in society. To him alone, it seemed, to him whose love and reverence she ought to have desired, she was becoming indifferent as to the impression she made. Was the other side of her a pose? Dick found himself walking very fast, and he slackened his pace to a respectable gait. If Lena the lovable was a pose, then the inspiration and ideals and joy of his life were frauds. That thought was too appalling. He deliberately stopped thinking about it and turned his thoughts to frauds in city politics, which were easier to endure.