Social success means to this family a speaking acquaintance with any wealthier unit which originally considered itself “above” this family. Moral success means to this family an exemption from the prosecution of the forces it has reared for its own protection—keeping out of jail, out of scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner gossip of its friends. Of an evening you will find this family in the living room. The husband and father reads a newspaper. He has worked in his office all day and is tired. Life long ago ceased to mean anything to him. He is an animal husk in fine linen. He has his little prejudices and his little conventions. Indeed, he is a part of the system of the unit but not much interested in it. He never was possessed of the capacity for beauty which his women folk once had and which they found it necessary to kill in each other. Man is a more natural part of the world’s ugliness. He is coarser stuff in general. For him it is not necessary to wage any struggle. He accepted matrimony because of a concentrated physical curiosity in one woman, and because it was the thing to do at his age. Love suffered epileptic dissolution in the nuptial couch. Honor toward his woman expired when the mysteries of her flesh paled. Obedience is his natural state—that is, long ago he established a line of least resistance and inoculated his women folk with the fable that adherence to _this_ line was the obedience and respect he owed them. If a latent instinct awakens suddenly in him he indulges himself. He finds it rather difficult to be immoral, but as he hesitates a latent strength overcomes his fear and thus he is able to be immoral and unfaithful to his own convenient restrictions in a natural manner and with no great loss of sleep. One man in ten thousand inherits the beauty of the woman who bore him and he becomes an artist. It is not necessary for him to revolt. His fathers have taken care of that. There is an assured place in the world for him—not in the living room here in front of the fireplace but elsewhere, in places of which poets sing. The family man keeps posted. He knows what is going on in the world but does not understand it. He is not capable of understanding. But sometimes understanding and reason coincide with his prejudices and he is then as liable to hold minority views as not. He is dry, sometimes clever. But always he jogs, jogs, jogs along. He can even sleep night after night in the same bed with his wife without feeling annoyance. His bluntedness is complete. Dostoevsky is right.