Oh! but he chose his vocation.  He likes it.  It satisfies his instincts.  It is his life. (So you say.) Well, does he like it?  Does it satisfy his instincts?  Is it his life?  If truly the answer is affirmative, he is at any rate not conscious of the fact.  He is aware of no ecstasy.  What is the use of being happy unless he knows he is happy?  Some men know that they are happy in the hours of business, but they are few.  The majority are not, and the bulk of the majority do not even pretend to be.  The whole attitude of the average plain man to business implies that business is a nuisance, scarcely mitigated.  With what secret satisfaction he anticipates that visit to the barber’s in the middle of the morning!  With what gusto he hails the arrival of an unexpected interrupting friend!  With what easement he decides that he may lawfully put off some task till the morrow!  Let him hear a band or a fire-engine in the street, and he will go to the window with the eagerness of a child or of a girl-clerk.  If he were working at golf the bands of all the regiments of Hohenzollern would not make him turn his head, nor the multitudinous blazing of fireproof skyscrapers.  No!  Let us be honest.  Business constitutes the steepest, roughest league of the appointed path.  Were it otherwise, business would not be universally regarded as a means to an end.

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