He would like her to bring his slippers to him, as she used to do in the old days, to hover round him a little with endearing words, and then, with not too much of _that_, to keep quiet, assenting to his opinions when he expresses them, and being restful. He has his own grievances. He is not without troubles of soul and body. He has had to face disappointment, disillusionment, hours of blank pessimism. He has had to get to grips with reality, after the romanticism of his youth, and to put a check upon his natural instincts and desires. In many ways it is harder for the man than for the woman. Civilization and the monogamous code have not been framed on easy lines for men. To keep the ordinary rules of his caste he must put a continual restraint upon himself, make many sacrifices. Women and wives forget that human nature has not changed because men wear black coats and tall hats instead of the skins of beasts. Human nature is exactly the same as it ever was, strong and savage, but it has to be tamed and repressed within the four walls of a flat in West Kensington, or within a semi-detached house at Wimbledon. There are moments when the man hears the call of the wild, and loathes respectability and conventionality with a deadly loathing. In his heart, as in the heart of every man, there is a little Bohemia, a little country of lawlessness and errant fancy and primitive desires. Sometimes when he has shut himself up in his study, when the servants are in the kitchen washing up the supper-things, when his wife is lying down with a bad headache, he unlocks the door of that Bohemia in his heart, and his imagination goes roving, and he hears the pan-pipes calling, and the stamp of the cloven hoofs of the old Nature-god. He would like to cut and run sometimes from this respectable life of his, to go in search of adventure down forbidden pathways, and to find the joy of life again in Liberty Hall. This fretful wife of his, this social-ladder climbing, the whole business of “playing the game” in the same old way, makes him very tired, and gets on his nerves at times most damnably. He has his temptations. He hears siren voices calling him. He sees the lure of the witch-women. To feel his pulse thrill to the wine of life, to get the fever of joy in his blood again, to plunge into the fiery lake of passion, are temptations from which he does not escape because he is Something in the City, or a barrister-at-law, and a married man with a delicate wife. But, being a man, with a man’s work, and a man’s ambition, he keeps his sanity, and quite often his self-respect. His eyes are clear enough to see the notice-boards on the boundary lines of the forbidden territory, “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” “Please keep off the grass,” “No thoroughfare.” He locks up the gate to the little Bohemia in his heart, and puts the key into a secret cupboard of his brain. He understands quite clearly that if he once “goes off the