Let there be no mistake here: Felix Kennaston had married a woman admirably suited to him, and he had never regretted that act. Nor with the advent of Ettarre, did he regret it: and never at any time would he have considered separating his diurnal existence from that of his thin beady-eyed capable wife, with graver seriousness than he would have accorded, say, to a rambling notion of some day being gripped in a trap and having no way to escape save by cutting off one of his feet. His affection for Kathleen was well-founded, proved, and understood; but, as it happens, this narrative does not chance to deal with that affection. And besides, what there was to tell concerning Kennaston’s fondness for his wife was duly set forth years ago. Meanwhile, it began vaguely to be rumored among Kennaston’s associates that he drank more than was good for him; and toward “drugs” also sped the irresponsible arrows of surmise. He himself noticed, without much interest, that daily he, who had once been garrulous, was growing more chary of speech; and that his attention was apt to wander when the man’s or woman’s face before him spoke at any length. These shifting faces talked of wars and tariffs and investments and the weather and committee-meetings, and of having seen So-and-so and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, and it all seemed of importance to the wearers of these faces; so that he made pretense to listen, patiently. What did it matter? It did not matter a farthing, he considered, for he had cheated life of its main oppression, which is loneliness. Now at last Felix Kennaston could unconcernedly acknowledge that human beings develop graveward in continuous solitude. His life until this had been in the main normal, with its due share of normal intimacies with parents, kinsmen, friends, a poet’s ordinary allotment of sweethearts, and, chief of all, with his wife. No one of these people, as he reflected in a comminglement of yearning and complacency, had ever comprehended the real Felix Kennaston as he existed, in all his hampered strugglings and meannesses, his inadequacies and his divine unexercised potentialities. And he, upon the other hand, knew nothing of these people with any certainty. Pettifoggeries were too easily practiced in speech or gesture, emotions were too often feigned or overcolored in expression, and unpopular thoughts were too instinctively dissembled, as he forlornly knew by his own conduct of daily life, for him to put very zealous faith in any information gained through his slender fallible five senses; and it was the cream of the jest that through these five senses lay his only means of getting any information whatever.