The absence of self-consciousness from the members of this household lent a peculiar attractiveness to the life there. There was nothing morbid in their attitude to themselves nor in their relation to one another. Life was so obviously their master, and they so implicitly obedient to its control. You could lose in a measure the thought of self-directed effort to be something or do something, in the sense that you got of nearness to the spontaneity of primal force. Mrs. Schulz, for example, never impressed one as trying to exercise a certain influence in obedience to a volition formed upon a preconceived plan, but rather as being what she was as the expression of a life within and exercising an influence which was dominant by reason of its native virtue. And the men were never awkward and constrained in their courteous manner toward her, as they would have been had this been prompted by a sense of formal politeness, instead of being, as it was, their spontaneous tribute to her gentle ladyhood. One wondered at first how such serenity would weather the storms. And when they came, the wonder grew at the further naturalness which they revealed. Monday mornings were apt to be prolific of bad weather. The long, monotonous week loomed before us, and our nerves were unstrung with the violent reaction bred of over-indulgence in the freedom of a holiday. Our tempers, as a result, were all out of tune, and there was no merging of individuality in the harmony of a home. One was reminded of the discordant harping, each on its own string, of all the instruments of an orchestra before they blend melodiously in the accord of the overture. The hired girl, awkward and ungainly and dense, had neglected the mush and let it burn, and now with stupid vacancy in her dull eyes she moved about more in the way than of any service. The children, half-dressed in their pitiful, soiled garments, were sprawling underfoot, quarrelling among themselves and whimpering in their appeals for their mother’s intervention. Mrs. Schulz, at her wits’ end to get breakfast ready promptly, was bending over a stove whose fire smouldered and smoked and would not burn briskly in the raw east wind which was blowing down the chimney, and at the same time there grated on her ears the wails of the children and the ill-tempered complaints of the men and the stupid questions of the hired girl, and all the while her nerves were throbbing to the dull agony of a toothache. The men, roused from insufficient sleep, were crowding into the over-crowded kitchen, hectoring one another for their slowness at the basins; one loud in his complaint over the loss of some article of dress, another insistent in his demand for a turn at the mirror, and all of them perilously near the verge of a violent outbreak. There was much swearing of a very sincere kind and much plain speaking of personal views without circumlocution or reservation, but in the end the storm would spend its fury and pass.