“Can’t something be done?” says his wife, meaning, “Can’t something be done to ameliorate your hard lot?”

(Misguided creature!  It was the wrong phrase to use.  And any phrase would have been the wrong phrase.  She ought to have caressed him, for to a caress there is no answer.)

“You know perfectly well that nothing can be done!” he snaps her up, like a tiger snapping at the fawn.  And his eyes, challenging hers, seem to say:  “Can I neglect my business?  Can I shirk my responsibilities?  Where would you be if I shirked them?  Where would the children be?  What about old age, sickness, death, quarter-day, rates, taxes, and your new hat?  I have to provide for the rainy day and for the future.  I am succeeding, moderately; but let there be no mistake—­success means that I must sacrifice present pleasure.  Pleasure is all very well for you others, but I—­” And then he will finish aloud, with the air of an offended and sarcastic martyr:  “Something be done, indeed!”

She sighs.  The domestic scene is over.

Now, he may be honestly convinced that nothing can be done.  Let us grant as much.  But obviously it suits his pride to assume that nothing can be done.  To admit the contrary would be to admit that he was leaving something undone, that he had organized his existence clumsily, even that he had made a fundamental miscalculation in the arrangement of his career.  He has confessed to grave dissatisfaction.  It behoves him, for the sake of his own dignity and reputation, to be quite sure that the grave dissatisfaction is unavoidable, inevitable, and that the blame for it rests with the scheme of the universe, and not with his particular private scheme.  His rôle is that of the brave, strong, patient victim of an alleged natural law, by reason of which the present must ever be sacrificed to the future, and he discovers a peculiar miserable delight in the rôle.  “Miserable” is the right adjective.

II

Nevertheless, in his quality of a wise plain man, he would never agree that any problem of human conduct, however hard and apparently hopeless, could not be solved by dint of sagacity and ingenuity—­provided it was the problem of another person!  He is quite fearfully good at solving the problems of his friends.  Indeed, his friends, recognizing this, constantly go to him for advice.  If a friend consulted him and said: 

“Look here, I’m engaged in an enterprise which will absorb all my energies for three years.  It will enable me in the meantime to live and to keep my family, but I shall have scarcely a moment’s freedom of mind.  I may have a little leisure, but of what use is leisure without freedom of mind?  As for pleasure, I shall simply forget what it is.  My life will be one long struggle.  The ultimate profit is extremely uncertain.  It may be fairly good; on the other hand, it may be nothing at all.”

The plain man, being also blunt, would assuredly interrupt: