"I'm damned tired making the best of things, if you want to know what is the matter with me," he had remarked crossly to his wife.
"The idea, Mr. Peachey! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" that sprightly lady had responded while she prepared herself for her victory over Cyrus.
"Well, I ain't," honest Tom had retorted. "I've gone on pretending for fifty years and I'm going to stop it. What good has it done, anyway? It hasn't put a roof on, has it?"
"I told you you oughtn't to go to sleep right on top of your dinner," she had replied soothingly. "I declare you're perfectly purple. I never saw you so upset. Here, take this palm-leaf fan and go and see if you can't find a draught. You know it's downright sinful to talk that way after the Lord has been so good to you."
But Philosophy, though she is unassailable when she clings to her safeguard of the universal, meets her match whenever she descends to an open engagement with the particular.
"W-what's He done for me?" demanded not Tom, but the whiskey inside of him.
Driven against that bleak rock of fact upon which so many shining generalizations have come to wreck, Mrs. Peachey had cast about helplessly for some floating spar of logic which might bear her to the firm ground of established optimism. "I declare, Tom, I believe you are out of your head!" she exclaimed, adding immediately, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself to be so ungrateful when the good Lord has kept you out of the poorhouse. If you weren't tipsy, I'd give you a hard shaking. Now, you take that palm-leaf fan and go right straight downstairs."
So Tom had gone, for his wife, who lacked the gift of argument, possessed the energy of character which renders such minor attributes unnecessary; and Oliver, passing through the hall a couple of hours later, found him still helplessly seeking the draught towards which she had directed him.
"Any chance of a breeze springing up?" inquired the young man as they moved together to the porch.
The force which was driving him out of the house into the suffocating streets was in his voice when he spoke, but honest Tom did not hear it. After the four war years in which he had been almost sublime, the old soldier had gradually ceased even to be human, and that vegetable calm which envelops persons who have fallen into the habit of sitting still, had endowed him at last with the perfect serenity of a cabbage. The only active principle which ever moved in him was the borrowed principle of alcohol—for when that artificial energy subsided, he sank back, as he was beginning to do now, into the spiritual inertia which sustains those who have outlived their capacity for the heroic.