Sometimes the fit of exaltation and hope would last for hours, but it was enough to be brought for one moment into contact with the realities around him to stop it all. A summons to dinner would come, perhaps, and, if obeyed, the atmosphere produced by this change of scene was fatal. If he ventured to disregard such a summons, he felt the pall of coldness and disapproval hanging over him, and that feeling crippled him. It was a favorite remark of his wife, that considering how little she required or expected of him, she thought she had a right to demand that he should be regular at meals, and should not counteract the lesson of punctuality which she tried to instil into her children. He felt the force of this, and stifled his complaints, living in dread of meal-time, and often prevented by this dread from making any progress at all. When the heavy discouragement which came from his continually frustrated efforts settled down upon him, he grew moody and silent, and feeling that he was a drone in this busy household, he would seek the wide and unreproaching fields, or sit by the placid river bank, and content himself for hours imagining what would happen if the wonder-child he dreamed of should be born to him. His own life and career were utterly without hope, but now he could live again a better, fuller, freer life in this fresh young one, unhampered by inherent difficulties and self-made hindrances. As time went on his life became daily more circumscribed and aimless. His wife, with her usual shrewdness, had discovered that any effort to make a farmer and a man of business of him would be folly, and had long ago given it up. By degrees, she seemed to expect less and less of him, accepted the evident and inevitable, and ordered the life of her household in complete independence of him. She was a woman who felt it important to have the approval of her conscience and her neighbors, and both the one and the other acquitted her of blame concerning her duty as a wife. Sometimes people expressed wonder at her great patience with such a husband--a thing that she never encouraged them to say--but she felt that she deserved the tribute, and in this opinion her husband concurred. The task in life to which she set herself with the greatest fervor was to counteract in her children any tendency to resemble their father. So far, there had been slight indication of anything of the sort, and after having borne four little counterparts of herself in dispositions and tastes, she had almost ceased to dread a reproduction of her husband.