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!

To gain money was exhausting; to spend it is precisely as exhausting.  He cannot quit the appointed path nor lift the doom.  Dinner is finished ere he has begun to recover from the varied shock of home.  Then his daughter may negligently throw him a few moments of charming cajolery.  He may gossip in simple idleness with his wife.  He may gambol like any infant with the dog.  A yawn.  The shadow of the next day is upon him.  He must not stay up too late, lest the vigour demanded by the next day should be impaired.  Besides, he does not want to stay up.  Naught is quite interesting enough to keep him up.  And bed, too, is part of the appointed, unescapable path.  To bed he goes, carrying ten million preoccupations.  And of his state of mind the kindest that can be said is that he is philosophic enough to hope for the best.

And after the night he wakes up, slowly or quickly according to his temperament, and greets the day with: 

“Oh, Lord!  Another day!  What a grind!”

II

The interesting point about the whole situation is that the plain man seldom or never asks himself a really fundamental question about that appointed path of his—­that path from which he dare not and could not wander.

Once, perhaps in a parable, the plain man travelling met another traveller.  And the plain man demanded of the traveller: 

“Where are you going to?”

The traveller replied: 

“Now I come to think of it, I don’t know.”

The plain man was ruffled by this insensate answer.  He said: 

“But you are travelling?”

The traveller replied: 

“Yes.”

The plain man, beginning to be annoyed, said: 

“Have you never asked yourself where you are going to?”

“I have not.”

“But do you mean to tell me,” protested the plain man, now irritated, “that you are putting yourself to all this trouble, peril, and expense of trains and steamers, without having asked yourself where you are going to?”

“It never occurred to me,” the traveller admitted.  “I just had to start and I started.”

Whereupon the plain man was, as too often with us plain men, staggered and deeply affronted by the illogical absurdity of human nature.  “Was it conceivable,” he thought, “that this traveller, presumably in his senses—­” etc. (You are familiar with the tone and the style, being a plain man yourself.) And he gave way to moral indignation.