veranda and look at the landscape while he waited. It was one of the
loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of an
abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of the
valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped with
folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops. But Lander was tired
of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put' up with them,
in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same resignation
that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars and sleepers,
and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables. He was chained to the restless
pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for its
impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife's disappointments from
it. He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an order
of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though there
were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of its
justice. He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was master
in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he was in
some sort of authority. He perceived that now he was a slave to the
wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he was
never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she asked.
He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from him, and he
had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by her whims,
who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object. He felt no
rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender regard for him,
and that she believed she was considering him first in her most selfish
arrangements. He always hoped that sometime she would get tired of her
restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in some stated place;
and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind of business again.
Till this should happen he waited with an apathetic patience of which his
present abeyance was a detail. He would hardly have thought it anything
unfit, and certainly nothing surprising, that the landlady should have