carefulness, if he means to succeed. He will probably live--or be said
to live--in some suburb more or less remote from the roaring centre of
affairs. The first light of the winter dawn will see him alert;
breakfast is a hurried passover performance; a certain train must be
caught at all hazard to digestion, and the most leisured moments of the
day will be those he passes in the railway carriage. Once arrived at
his office he must plunge into the vortex of business; do battle with a
thousand rivalries and competitions; day after day must labour in the
same wearisome pursuits, content, perhaps, if at the end of the year he
shall have escaped as by a miracle commercial shipwreck. He will come
back to his residence, night after night, a tired man; not pleasantly
wearied with pursuits which have exercised his complete powers, but
tired to the point of dejection by the narrowness and monotony of his
pursuits. I say he returns to his residence; I scorn to say his home,
for the house he rents is merely the barrack where he sleeps. Of the
life that goes on within this house, which is nominally his, he knows
nothing. In its daily ordering, or even in its external features, he
has no part. He has chosen no item of its furniture; he has had no
hand in its decoration; he has but paid the tradesmen's bills. His
children scarcely know him; they are asleep when he goes off in the
morning, and asleep when he returns at night; he is to them the strange
man who sits at the head of the table once a week and carves the Sunday
joint. It is well for them if they have a mother who possesses gifts
of government, sympathy, and patient comprehension, for it is clear
that they have no father. He gets a living, and perhaps in time an
ample living; but does he live?

It may be said that this picture is exaggerated; on the contrary, I
think it is under-estimated. I have myself known men whose average
daily absence from 'home' is twelve hours; they disappear by the eight