Nevertheless, with all his noise and emptiness, Fred was glowing, or seemed to be glowing to me. His ideas are puerile. His talk is cast in one mold, upon one design, that of evoking laughter. But he is alive. He is not apathetic. That is what I deplore in myself, the apathy that has saturated me after the recent events, that are like a dark liquid which has entered my mind at one point and then by natural action unchecked has stained every fiber of my being. It is not thus I shall acquit myself of the task I have assumed. I must become alive! The children, I am beginning to think, are the only creatures really alive in this world. They don’t hanker after musty-smelling first editions, after knowledge of bygone old worthies like Ser Brunetto some seven centuries dead, nor yet after the eternal conversion of life into dollars. To-day I witnessed a curious excrescence of their bubbling imaginations. My door standing open, I was able to observe a ceremony that transformed my dining room into a church and the four infants with solemn faces into the vivid celebrants of the sacrament of marriage. They are evidently ignorant of the "alderman" method. To the delight of Jimmie and Laura, Ranny, my oldest nephew, with hieratic pomp, was being married to the girl Alicia. Even she knew better than to laugh as the boy was slipping a ring upon her finger, murmuring some gibberish which he had either learned or invented, and endowing her with all his worldly goods. The goods consisted first of all in the number of a hundred kisses, which the boy proceeded to administer with savage realism to the crowing delight of Jimmie and the uncontrollable giggling of Laura. This part of the endowment being finally completed, he brought forth from his pocket a small toy pistol and gravely placed it in her hand. I nearly jumped from my chair when I saw that. A pistol of all things! What could have made the little apes think of that? What a text for a cynic! Perhaps every bride ought to receive a pistol as part of her wedding dower? They then proceeded merrily to eat bits of cake and to laugh and chatter like any other wedding guests. I closed my door softly and for a space I was lost in reflection. For it suddenly came to me that to approach life with anything less than the playful zest of children was a grim, a fatal error. It was odd that Gertrude should have chosen that hour to evince the only sign since her decision that she had any memory of me. When she came in, preceded by the knock and laconic announcement of Griselda, the first words she spoke were: "Well, Ranny, and how is domesticity?" "Highly educative," I told her, as I ministered to her usual wants. "I have just learned the proper way of marrying a woman." "Indeed?" murmured Gertrude, somewhat sourly, I thought, "and how is that?"