"And do you give the children lessons?"
"Yes, ma'am," she answered, lowering her eyes as though a crime had found her out.
"And how old are you?" asked Gertrude not unkindly.
"Going on fourteen, ma'am." The girl looked up at once, responsive to the gentler tone. But wishing to relieve her of the interrogatory, I lamely put in a word urging that she take the children out at once before the sun had disappeared. The girl glided away like a shadow.
"Why, she's quite attractive—the little thing," murmured Gertrude. "You'll have quite a menagerie." Then, laughingly turning to me, she cried, "Oh, Ranny, Efficiency ought to be your middle name."
"Perhaps I'd better adopt it?" I murmured.
"Do," said Gertrude. "Well, so long, old boy, I must be running." And in her haste she even forgot to let me kiss her good-by.
So after all the alderman at the City Hall was not to sing his song over us yet. For no reason that I can help I seem to be in disgrace with fortune, Gertrude and aldermen's eyes.
A nameless melancholy, a kind of humorous sadness, has taken possession of me.
It is not my lost tranquillity that I regret now, nor does Gertrude's taunt of inefficiency disturb me. But at bottom I have always realized the type of man that I am not. The type of man who stands four-square in face of all the shocks and emergencies of life, who can meet all changes and events with equal courage, who can take any situation smilingly by the hand as though he were its indisputable and indulgent master, that is the sort of man I should wish to be. But all my own defects clamorously accuse me of embodying the exact opposite of such an ideal. I have shrunk away from life until it fits me like a coarse ill-cut garment rather than a glove. It takes a vast deal of living to be alive, and the dread obsession haunts me that I have become as one mummified in this dim catacomb of books.