ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he was involved more and more deeply in it. As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. "I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime interests of man.