Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor, the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being "bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. We can see from this that although his conscious life had been overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature.