He received these anonymous letters daily. They had never made an impression on him; yet of late he no longer destroyed them, but read them attentively and put them aside in a secret drawer. He could not have said why. They contained accusations against his wife, they contained imputations against his daughter. They sought to intimidate him by threatening that he might be stabbed in the dark. They warned him that his spies were utterly untrustworthy. They told him that his divorced wife was suffering from poverty and hated him, they told him that he had a son whom he had left unprovided for. They stealthily grubbed up all the secret or obscure passages in his life and his career. The thing depressed his spirits in spite of himself. It was all very vague; and he had nothing with which to reproach himself. In his own eyes and the world's, he was a good official, a good husband and a good father, he was a good man. That he should be blamed for having judged too unjustly and unfairly here, for having acted cruelly there, for having divorced his first wife, for having a son running wild in the compound; that people should throw mud at Léonie and Doddie: it all depressed him nowadays. For it was unaccountable that people should do just this. To this man, with his practical good sense, the vagueness was just the most vexatious part of it. He would not fear an open fight, but this mock battle in the dark was upsetting his nerves and his health. He could not conceive why it was happening. There was nothing to tell him. He could not conjure up the face of an enemy. And the letters came day after day; and enmity lurked daily in the shadows about him. It was too mystical and too much opposed to his nature not to embitter and depress and sadden him. Then paragraphs appeared in the lesser papers, utterances of a mean and hostile press, vague accusations or palpable falsehoods. Hatred was seething all about him. He could not fathom the reason of it, he became ill from brooding over it. And he discussed it with nobody and hid his suffering deep down within himself.