Just so, you assented: and in the life of any possible married man, who was that person? The question was rhetorical. You did not have to answer it, any more than did most husbands. None the less, you esteemed it a question which no married man had failed to consider, if gingerly and as if from afar, with the mere tail of his mental eye, in unacknowledged reveries. It was perhaps the memory of these cloistered considerations which made married men acutely uncomfortable when any other man disposed of his wife without all this half-hearted paltering with the just half-pleasant notion that some day she would go so far as to make justifiable—A gesture showed what, as plainly as one could show anything in this vague endlessness of grays and gleamings. No, madame might depend upon it, to assist any gentleman in permanently disposing of his wife was not, in the long run, philanthropy. It really did make the majority of other husbands uncomfortable, whether through envy or though a conscience-stricken recalling of unacknowledged reveries, you did not pretend to say. All that might be true enough, Freydis admitted, from her dim nook among the gray cushions, without alluring her into the charitable act of preventing a child’s enduring the sorrows and fatigues of living. Ah, but here again, madame must not reason so carelessly, nor be misled by specious first appearances. Let us, instead, be logical! The child, knowing nothing, would not know what it was escaping: and it would not be grateful, it would derive no æsthetic pleasure from the impressive ceremony of giving by the old ritual, it would even resent the moment’s physical pain. But the beholders of the deed, and all that heard of it, would be acutely uncomfortable, since the father that secured for his child immunity from trouble and annoyance, did harm and worked great mischief by setting an example which aroused people to those frenzies evocable by no other prodigy than a display of common-sense. For people would turn from this proof of paternal affection, to the world from which the child was being removed: and people would be unhappy, because, with all their natural human propensity for fault-finding tugging them toward denunciation, nobody would be able to deny the common-sense of rescuing a child from discomforts and calamities. What professional perjurer anywhere, madame, whether in prison or politics or the pulpit, could muster the effrontery to declare life other than a long series of discomforts diversified only by disasters? What dignity was possible in an arena we entered in the manner of urine and left in the shape of ordure? What father endowed with any real religious faith could, after the most cursory glancing over of the sufferings he had got gratis in this life and had laboriously earned in the next,—could then appraise without conscience-stricken remorse the dilemma in which he had placed his offspring?