Moreover, when the plain man gets home again, does his wife's face say to him: "I know that your real life is now over for the day, and I regret for your sake that you have to return here. I know that the powerful interest of your life is gone. But I am glad that you have had five, six, seven, or eight hours of passionate pleasure"? Not a bit! His wife's face says to him: "I commiserate with you on all that you have been through. It is a great shame that you should be compelled to toil thus painfully. But I will try to make it up to you. I will soothe you. I will humour you. Forget anxiety and fatigue in my smiles." She does not fetch his comfortable slippers for him, partly because, in this century, wives do not do such things, and partly because comfortable slippers are no longer worn. But she does the equivalent--whatever the equivalent may happen to be in that particular household. And he expects the commiseration and the solace in her face. He would be very hurt did he not find it there. And even yet he is not relaxed. Even yet the appointed path stretches inexorably in front, and he cannot wander. For now he feels the cogs and cranks of the highly complex domestic machine. At breakfast he declined to hear them; they were shut off from him; he was too busy to be bothered with them. At evening he must be bothered with them. Was it not he who created the machine? He discovers, often to his astonishment, that his wife has an existence of her own, full of factors foreign to him, and he has to project himself, not only into his wife's existence, but into the existences of other minor personages. His daughter, for example, will persist in growing up. Not for a single day will she pause. He arrives one night and perceives that she is a woman and that he must treat her as a woman. He had not bargained for this. Peace, ease, relaxation in a home vibrating to the whir of such astounding phenomena? Impossible dream! These phenomena were originally meant by him to be the ornamentation of his career, but they are threatening to be the sole reason of his career. If his wife lives for him, it is certain that he lives just as much for his wife; and as for his daughter, while she emphatically does not live for him, he is bound to admit that he has just got to live for her--and she knows it!