see them when he was in one of these moods. What was really present
with him, excluding everything else, was the sting of something more
than usually repulsive of which they knew nothing. Mrs. M'Kay's
answer to her children's remonstrances when they were alone with her
always was, "He is so worried," and she invariably dwelt upon their
faults which had given him the opportunity for his wrath.

I think M'Kay's treatment of her wholly wrong. I think that he ought
not to have imposed himself upon her so imperiously. I think he
ought to have striven to ascertain what lay concealed in that modest
heart, to have encouraged its expression and development, to have
debased himself before her that she might receive courage to rise,
and he would have found that she had something which he had not; not
HIS something perhaps, but something which would have made his life
happier. As it was, he stood upon his own ground above her. If she
could reach him, well and good, if not, the helping hand was not
proffered, and she fell back, hopeless. Later on he discovered his
mistake. She became ill very gradually, and M'Kay began to see in
the distance a prospect of losing her. A frightful pit came in view.
He became aware that he could not do without her. He imagined what
his home would have been with other women whom he knew, and he
confessed that with them he would have been less contented. He
acknowledged that he had been guilty of a kind of criminal epicurism;
that he rejected in foolish, fatal, nay, even wicked indifference,
the bread of life upon which he might have lived and thriven. His
whole effort now was to suppress himself in his wife. He read to
her, a thing he never did before, and when she misunderstood, he
patiently explained; he took her into his counsels and asked her
opinion; he abandoned his own opinion for hers, and in the presence
of her children he always deferred to her, and delighted to