She had become a critic of his domestic relations. This servant, this mal-arrangement of beak and eyes, with bare brain enough not to let plates fall and not to dangle her fingers in scalding water nor singe her head-feathers in the oven--this servant of his arraigned _him_ in his humanity! And if this servant, then all his servants. And if all his servants, then all the servants of the neighborhood. The whole Plutonian shore croaked its black damnation of him. Of _him_!--the leading citizen of his community, its central vital character who held in his keeping the destiny of a people! He had a vision of the august assemblage of them uplifted into the heavenliness of an African Walhalla--such as is disclosed in the last act of the _Tetralogy_--all gazing down upon him as a profaning Alberic who had raped the virgin Gold of marital love. On a near peak of especial moral grandeur, his _Nevermore_ stood in her supernal resentment of his wife's wrong. For whatever _Nevermore_ was not, at least, she was woman. And what woman fails to espouse any wife's dignity except the woman who supplants the wife? (Not even she; for if ever in turn her hour comes, her first outcry is, 'I might have known.') Dr. Birney did not have three hours for this morning's business, then, but two hours and a half; and forthwith beginning, he took from his breast-pocket a small book and transferred from it to a large diary his notes of visits to patients on the day preceding. This soon done, he was ready for the main work. It was now the closing week of the year when according to custom he posted the year's books; for he was his own secretary. By New Year's Day his accounts were about ready and new books were opened. He always took up with repugnance this valuation of his services. It was to him one of life's ironies that in order to live he must take toll of death. He must harvest his bread from the fields of tears. He must catch his annual treasure from those rainbows of hope that spanned weary pillows. He must fill his wine-jar by dipping his cup into the waves of Lethe. He must equip his very stable with the ferriage he had collected on the banks of the Styx. His heart was never in his bookkeeping; this morning he could barely fix upon it his thoughts; so that before commencing he allowed himself to turn the leaves, getting a distasteful bird's-eye view of this panorama of neighborhood suffering and mortality there outspread on the table.