“Well, yes, I’ve quit,” said Brenner. “My wife didn’t like me to be away so much, used to get scared nights, and there’s a sight of things to see to when you have a house—the coal, you know, and the plumbing getting out of order, and then after the boy came—oh, yes, I’ve quit it all right. Seems sort of tied down in a way after you’ve been your own boss, but I’m not sorry—I’m pretty well fixed, I guess. Travelling’s all very well for a single man, but it gets to be an awful pull after you’re married. You miss a lot.” “I’ve been travelling for sixteen years,” said Prescott soberly; “two years before I married—at twenty-four—and fourteen since.” “That so? It’s a pretty long time.” “Yes, it is. I’ve been wanting to give it up.” He hesitated, and then continued with rare expansiveness: “The fact is, there’s a position open for me at home now, but I can’t quite see my way clear to taking it. The salary’s nominally all right, but there’s my living to be taken into account, and other things. I figure out that it would mean about three hundred dollars a year less than we have now—and I don’t see how we could live on that. You see, the trouble is it’s away out of the line I’m in now—yet there _may_ be a future in it.” He went into explanatory detail, led on by Brenner’s questioning interest. “Couldn’t you make it up in any way by outside commissions?” Prescott nodded. “Ah, that’s what I’m trying to get at. You’re a wise man to have made the break early, Brenner. Every year I’ve meant to.” Prescott spoke with a bitter patience. “I’ve never thought of my being on the road as anything but temporary, and here I’m at it still. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to change; you don’t know how to take the risk. I haven’t told my wife yet about this offer, for I don’t want to disappoint her. I hoped to have had a letter from her to-night—the last one was rather disquieting—but I’m behind my schedule.” “Well, I know what that is,” said Brenner heartily. “I had a letter from Mame once after we were first married—she’d cried all over the paper in big blots; she thought she’d die before morning. Well, my train was snowed up in a South Dakota blizzard and I never got another letter for a week. _Holy smoke!_ I never want to go through that kind of a racket again. Then, when I _did_ hear, I found she’d been to a party the next evening as chipper as you please—belle of the ball. I tell you there’s too much seesaw about that sort of thing for a limited nature like mine; but I suppose I’d have got used to teetering on it same as the rest of you, only she made up her mind I was to quit—and quit I did. Mame runs _me_! I guess she’ll try and run you too; she tries to run most any one that comes to hand. This is my shebang.”