Charles had never found himself able to inflict even a just punishment. Wherever possible he avoided the sight of pain. In the street he would go a block out of his intended way to evade the familiar spectacle of some wretched beggar. In doing so, his relief in escape was greater than his sense of guilt. If he was approached directly for whatever pathetic cause he always gave away everything that was in his pocket, and only asked that no one remind him of the occasion of his generosity. His wife was an efficient charity worker. Every quarter year he allowed her a sum--always above what her practical nature would have dictated--to dispose of in the alleviation of physical distress. He deferred to her common sense, and was glad to be relieved of the depressing knowledge of particular cases. As regarded legislative remedies for wrongs, he was conservative where his business dealings were affected, but had an open sympathy with revolutionary protests on the part of oppressed peoples in any far-off European or Asiatic state. He had persuaded himself that extreme measures were needed to compel fair play from the ancient orthodoxies abroad, while reformatory methods could achieve everything at home. He decried the prevalence of divorce, and the disintegration of the home. Yet never, in a given instance, had he been able to condemn the friend or acquaintance who had become dissatisfied with his wife and sought happiness by forming new ties. Maternity in the abstract represented to him a confused and embarrassing ideal. But he recalled his own mother, who had never loved him, with a pain he did not attempt to analyze. He was thinking now of young Goode's wife, who, before her marriage was a year old, had run away with another man. Two days previously Charles had met young Goode in the street. To keep from listening to any reminiscence of the affair, Charles had talked to him rapidly in a jocular voice and taken him off to his club to give him a drink. Charles turned in the bed, groaned, and hid his face. If only Catherine were far away! Had gone abroad for a trip, or something like that! He believed that the emotion he experienced when he held Julia in his arms or knelt with his head in her lap was unlike anything that had ever before come to him. He felt that through Julia he had discovered qualities in himself by which he could lift himself from the banal plane where he had been placed by others. The imposed acceptance of limitations had humiliated him. It was not so much Julia that he was afraid of losing, as the quality within him which he felt she alone could evoke. He knew his own weakness too well. If, at this crisis, he could not bring himself to initiate a change, the miracle which was present would lose its potency, and he would be convicted forever of the triviality which his friends saw in him.