His wife, poor soul, hoped that the baby's coming would influence him to better things. It grew worse. His appetite for liquor, which was evidently inherited from some bibulous ancestor, grew tyrannous, and he was a willing slave. Lucky at cards, ordinary gambling became too tame for him. He fell to speculating, cannily at first, but with success and increasing indulgence in liquor came recklessness. The man's naturally cool business judgment was clouded, for he was never wholly sober now. Yet his business prospects were still of the best, for he succeeded marvellously in retaining his strong hold on affairs. The dawn was more than likely to find him reeling, but the opening of the day's business invariably found him at his desk, alert, coldly inscrutable, his wits more than a match for the sharpest ones that might oppose him. Dissipated as he was in those days, he engineered some brilliant _coups_ which benefited his concern and increased his own prestige, to his material advantage. He was already pointed out as a man of power. He could have figured as a Napoleon of honorable business, as he later figured as a Napoleon of graft. Of splendid intellectual endowment, he chose to mar himself. Their home-life, because of his course, had grown unspeakably wretched. They lived simply; the bulk of the man's income was expended away from home. The wife did not reproach him and she had ceased to plead, but she was pale and silent and sad-eyed. She knew all now, and she lived only for her baby. Like many an infinitely better man, the husband's worst side was reserved for his family. The inevitable reaction of tippling, in a nature like his, rendered him fairly diabolic at times in his home; and the cruel spirit was the fiercer by reason of the need for its repression elsewhere. He remembered one morning when he stood shaving before his mirror, shaking from the effect of a debauch. It was several months after his son was born. His wife, in pitiful appeal to his better side, of whose existence she still dreamed, had softly entered the room, carrying the baby. She thoughtlessly approached from the side, and he neither heard nor saw her. A soft little hand, the baby's, crept into his neck. Shaken as he was, it startled him; his razor slipped and the blood spurted from a gash in his cheek. Blind with swift, unreasoning rage, he whirled with a curse and a murderous, involuntary swoop of his razor. She had sprung back with a sharp cry, but just too late. He heard again the sudden, shrill cry of the baby; saw the swift blood rimming an ugly gash above its little wrist; saw himself shriveling, before the horror in his wife's eyes, into a loathsome thing. "My God!" he had stammered, "I--I didn't mean--"