"I have no business of any description," he answered. "And between ourselves, Dominic, since I lost my seat on the borough council, I have had too much time on my hands, I think. It is beginning to be quite a trouble with me." "Is life too softly padded, too dead-level easy and comfortable?" Iglesias inquired. "Are you beginning to quarrel a little with your blessings?" George Lovegrove became very serious. "Yes," he said, "I am afraid you are right. As usual you have laid your finger on the spot. I do reproach myself for unthankfulness often. I know I have a good home, and everything decent and respectable about me; more so, indeed, than a man in my position has any right to expect. And yet I regret the old days in the city, Dominic, that I do. I should enjoy to be back at my old desk at the bank--just the little snap of anxiety in the morning as to whether one would catch the 'bus; the long ride through the streets with one's morning paper; the turning out with the other clerks--good fellows all of them, on the whole, were they not?--to get a snack of lunch. And then the coming home at night, with some trifling present or dainty to please the wife; and a look round the greenhouse and garden afterwards in your lounge suit; and hearing and retailing all the day's news, and talking of the good time coming when you would retire and be quite the independent gentleman; and the half-day on Saturday, too, taking some nice little outing to Richmond or Kew, or an exhibition or something of the sort, and then the Sunday's rest." He hesitated and sighed, looking wistfully at the white-clad babies. "If one had two or three of those little people of one's own it might be very different--though I would never breathe a word of such a thought to the wife. Females are so easily upset; and if it raises regrets in us men, it must be much more trying for them, poor things, to be childless. But where was I? Yes, well now the good time has come--and I feel a criminal in saying so, but it appears to me to be growing stale already, Dominic. It was better in anticipation than in fact. I am an ungrateful fellow, that I am, I know it; but sometimes I am inclined to ask myself whether all the things we set such fond hopes on are not like that." "No, not all," Iglesias answered, with a certain subdued enthusiasm. "There are things--a few--which never grow stale. One may build on them as on a foundation of rock. If they ever seem to fail us, to be shaken and overthrown, it is an evil delusion, and the cause lies not in them but in ourselves. It is we who fail, who are shaken and overthrown through palsied will and feebleness of faith. They remain forever inviolate." "I suppose so," the other man said timidly. He was unused to such vehemence of assertion on the part of his friend. He wondered to what it could refer. His thought, carrying back to the evening at the theatre, played around visions of distinguished amours. Then he steadied himself to heroic resolve.