Why is it that he slyly visits
after business hours the outlying section of the city, where the newest
and most desirable residences are offered at fashionable prices? Why
at odd moments does he make rows of figures on available scraps of
paper and on the blotter at his office, and abstractedly compute
interest on various sums at four and a half and five per cent.? Why?
Because the leaven of his wife's threat that her life will be shortened
is working in his bosom and he beholds her in his restless dreams
crushed to death beneath a myriad of waterbugs, all for the lack of an
inch of closet-room. Why? Because he is haunted perpetually by the
countenances of his daughters, on which he reads sorrowfully written
that they are wasting away for lack of the bedchamber apiece promised
them by their mother. Why? Because, in brief, he is a philosopher,
and recognizes that what is to be is to be, and that it is easier to
dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes (to adopt an elegant and
well-seasoned exemplar of impossibility) than to check the progress of
maternal pride.
Some four months after Josephine's announcement that she would live ten
years longer elsewhere, I returned home one afternoon with what she
subsequently stigmatized as a sly expression about the corners of my
mouth.
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