It is easier to philosophize about these things than it is to record them in cold fact. With shame and sorrow do I say it, but say it I must: My love went the way of the love of other men who feel (this was and remains the truth) far less than I. I, who had believed myself to love like no other before me, and none to come after me, and I, who had won the dearest woman in all the world--I stooped to suffer myself to grow used to my blessedness, like any low man who was incapable of winning or of wearing it. It cannot be said, it shall not be said, that I loved my wife less than the day I married her. It must be written that I became accustomed to my happiness. That ideal of myself, which my ideal of her created in me, and which no emergency of fate could have shaken, slipped in the old, fatal quicksand of use. Our ideal of ourselves is to our highest life like the heart to the pulsation. It is the divinest art of the love of woman for man that she clasps him to his vision of himself, as breath and being are held together. Until the time mentioned at the beginning of my narrative, I had in no sense appreciated the state of the case, as it lay between my ideal and my fact. That I had been more or less impatient of speech in my own home for some time past, is probably true. The ungoverned lip is a terrible master; and I had been a slave too long. I was in the habit of finding fault with my patients. I was accustomed to be what we call "quick" with servants. Neither had, I thought, as a rule, seemed to care the less for me on this account. If I lost a patient or a coachman now and then, I could afford to. The item did not trouble me. I was inconsiderate at times with personal friends. They said, It is his way, and bore with me. People usually bore with me; they always had. I looked upon this as one of the rights of temperament, so far as I looked upon it at all. I do not think this indulgence had occurred to me as other than a tribute. It is common enough in dealing with men of my sort. (And alas, there are enough of my sort; I must be looked upon rather as a type than a specimen.) Such indulgence is a movement of self-defence, or else of philosophy, upon the part of those who come in contact with us. To this view of the subject I had given no attention. I had lived to be almost fifty years old, and no person had ever said: "Esmerald Thorne, you trust your attractive qualities too far. Power and charm do not give a man a permit to be disagreeable. Your temperament does not release you from the common-place human duty of self-restraint. A gentleman has no more right to get uncontrollably angry than he has to get drunk. The patience with which others receive you is not a testimony to your strength; it is a concession to your weakness. You are living upon concessions like disease, or childhood, or age."