talked, but there came times when he would not even listen. One of these
was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later he had
undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as
effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
asleep.




II.

When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the
Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she
inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both
needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every
kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their
furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which
they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the
West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for
a term of years without consulting her. But she had her way about their
own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now
lived so long that she believed any other impossible. Its luxury and
idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.

They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she
had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was