What a curious jumble is our life! Forces strange and awe-inspiring, the very stars in their courses seem to be defending Laura’s children, lest I should do them an injury. But in order to keep them and rear them I must resort to a kind of olla-podrida of backstairs shifts and devices, such as I have described, that make my cheek burn. But I suppose it is as Dibdin says: We are all the ministers and retinue, be it in court dress or in tinsel and livery, of that exalted prince of the world, the child. For me, however, it is still a struggle to grasp that ineluctable truth. Perhaps as a reward for this, as a sort of pourboire of Fate, I shall become gruesomely rich, a kind of Mæcenas, an orgulous figure among scholars, and finance some new Tudor or early English texts or latter-day collections of the classics? My pipe has gone out. I have taken to puffing a pipe in a manner that would delight the soul of Dibdin. Dibdin! Every day I expect to hear from him, but still my expectation is vain. The children are all abed and I sit here filled with a sense that I am responsible for all of them, sleeping and waking, for their nourishment and existence, for all this machinery that keeps the six of us going, and the thought fills me with awe—and yet there is a kind of pleasant sense of pride in it, too. Dibdin would say that I reminded him of a broody hen, and Dibdin would be right. A broody hen is a model of responsibility for all mankind. Yet though I cannot look with young-eyed confidence upon all of this, or upon my enterprise with Fred, I can hardly resist a feeling that something of the youth and manhood I have spent as a solitary among books, something stirring and effervescent that I have suppressed, is struggling for an outlet. Fred’s methods of business, though I wince at some of them, fill me with gusts of irresistible laughter. His constant horseplay and good humor are infectious. To-day he came to me with a grave countenance and informed me that Sampson and Company, a house from which we sometimes buy a few bonds, desired to know whether we would join them in underwriting the Roumanian loan. "And what did you say?" I inquired with equal gravity. "Naturally I told him I must consult my partner." "What did they say to that?" "’Oh, sure,’ he said, ’but it isn’t a large loan—only fifteen millions. All we want you to take is about three millions.’" I looked at him quizzically. "Well, what d’you say, partner, shall we take it?" I scrutinized his baffling expression and roared with laughter. He joined me, laughing, until the tears trickled down his cheeks. "But look here," he began, the flamboyancy of his manner persisting even in private, "three millions isn’t so much—and the profit would be large." So long as it was horseplay I enjoyed the joke. But with Fred the barrier between jest and earnest is very thin, often indistinguishable. "Don’t talk rot," I told him. "Do you want a short cut to bankruptcy?"