It is not my lost tranquillity that I regret now, nor does Gertrude’s taunt of inefficiency disturb me. But at bottom I have always realized the type of man that I am not. The type of man who stands four-square in face of all the shocks and emergencies of life, who can meet all changes and events with equal courage, who can take any situation smilingly by the hand as though he were its indisputable and indulgent master, that is the sort of man I should wish to be. But all my own defects clamorously accuse me of embodying the exact opposite of such an ideal. I have shrunk away from life until it fits me like a coarse ill-cut garment rather than a glove. It takes a vast deal of living to be alive, and the dread obsession haunts me that I have become as one mummified in this dim catacomb of books. I have been to Carmichael’s office at his request and the blow that he has dealt me is heavier than any since Laura’s death. Laura, it appears, in her desperate desire to increase her income, had been speculating in the lying promises of oil and mining stocks which offered fabulous returns. One after another her substantial railway and steel bonds went to her brokers for "margins" and some were sold for current livelihood. No wonder she was compelled to resort to an orphanage for a "mother’s helper", who is herself a child. The result is that something less than two thousand dollars of Laura’s capital remains for her three motherless and fatherless children, the oldest of whom is eleven. I have no doubt but that her tortured and silent anxiety on this score hastened my poor sister’s death. Carmichael himself, her lawyer and adviser, was ignorant of her acts until it was too late. The dread goddess Fortune plainly does nothing by halves. If it were not for my grief over the suffering that poor Laura must have endured so uncomplainingly, I should be moved to uproarious laughter. Job, I feel sure, must have had his moments when the comforters were not there, when he laughed until the tears bedewed his dejected old beard. And I, incompetent recluse that I am, have undertaken the care and the rearing of three children! I should at least admire the completeness with which Fate plays her hands or produces her situations, were I not at this moment utterly and stonily impervious to all thought and all emotion—unless an inert and deadly sense of disaster be an emotion. No, that was not enough. What a glutton is that same Fate! Dibdin has been here to say a hasty good-by. He has heard of a ship that sails from San Francisco in a week and that will touch at his particular group of islands, so that he will not have to trans-ship at Papeete, as had been his earlier plan. I have never before in my life felt so utterly alone! He laughed a curious laugh, that seemed foolish yet exulting, when I told him I had decided to keep the children. His eyes glittered and he turned away for an instant to hide them.