“As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house--something you must never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and be publicly amiable to because you must be just--but something you never never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without feeling that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained inside. “Then the children came--she did and does love them. She lives for them. But they're part of herself too, you see, an essential part, and as she can't give herself to anybody but herself, she can't give them to me even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf--and she's the kind of woman whose children are always six to her. And she's their mother--and so she has her way. “That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago. “I'd done my job--I was President of the Commercial. And I'd made my money, and the money still kept coming in as if it didn't make any difference what I did with it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it for me? “I didn't have a home--I had a place where I ate and slept. I didn't have a wife--I had an acquaintance who kept house for me. I had children--at school and college. I didn't have real hobbies--I hadn't had time for them. And I was forty-nine. All I could do was go on making money till I died. “Well, you changed that,” his voice shook a little. “You came and I saw and knew and took you. And I'm not sorry. Because you've made me alive again. And I'm going to be alive now till I die. “Funny--I was never so anxious about anything happening as I have been about--our approaching mutual disappearance. Especially the last six months when I've been planning. But now that's settled. “Mary will have more than enough and the children are grown. They won't know--I still have brains enough to settle that and money will do nearly everything. It'll be a nine days' wonder. 'Sudden Disappearance of Prominent Financier--Foul Play Suspected' and that'll be all. “As for the Commercial--I haven't come to my age without finding out that nobody in the world is indispensable. If a taxi ran over me tomorrow they'd have to do without me--and Harris and the young men can handle things. “But you know where there'll be an elderly gentleman retired from business with a country house and a garden he can putter around in all his worst clothes. And a wife that reads Dickens to him in the evening--oh yes, Rose, we'll take Dickens along. And he'll be pretty contented as things go--that retired old gentleman.” The darkness had passed from his eyes--he was smiling now. “Be nice--eh Rose?”