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On Judgment Day when my fate goes into the balance it will not be my books or my good deeds that will turn the scale in my favor. It will be the fact that I have given happiness to Constance. It is that which justifies my existence; I am proud that I have been able to do so.
    Eight happy, dreaming placid months. There were sources of irritation that both Constance and I were able to ignore. Constance’s mother, for instance, is an admirable woman, but from the way she behaved it might almost have been thought that Baby John was her child, not Constance’s. All the women we knew who had children—and even some of the older ones who had not—adopted toward her a proprietorial air which under other circumstances I would have found maddening. I, of course, dropped out of the picture to their minds altogether. I think it was merely typical of the mass of self-deception among women which inducesthem to believe that the masculine share in the production of the next generation is a mere formality. They act as though they believe that, sometimes.
    Even Mrs. Rundle began to treat me with a pitying air of patronage. When I tried to assert myself I was received with a withering disdain which tore my self-respect from me and left me as a bolster robbed of its stuffing. I found consolation in the fact that she bore herself toward Constance, in domestic matters, in much the same way as she would have borne herself toward a twelve-year-old daughter of the house—tempering her apparent respect with apparent amusement, and flavoring the blend with complete disregard for instructions. Constance and I might as well have been a pair of children as the prospective father and mother of a family. But Constance found an infallible method of reducing her to immediate solicitude and subordination. She had only to hint for a moment that she felt tired, or a little out of sorts, for Mrs. Rundle’s attitude to change immediately. She would proffer respectful yet garrulous advice; she would even manage to call her “ma’am” (Mrs. Rundle found usually that it came more naturally to her lips to call Constance“Miss”); and then it would only need two words from Constance to launch forth upon a sea of reminiscence regarding every one of her numerous confinements.
    Eight happy, happy months. That was the period during which I wrote
Mary-round-the-Corner
, which is my best book, and always will be, whatever the critics say. Quiet months, happy months, hopeful months.
    A hundred yards from home was the nursing home to which Constance betook herself when the time came. She did not go without many misgivings; she could not believe me capable of looking after myself for four consecutive weeks. It was quite an effort for me to convince her that Mrs. Rundle would not let me starve, although I was forced to admit that at the same time she was quite capable of letting me start for the office in the morning with an unbrushed coat collar.
    Mrs. Rundle was to devote all day to looking after me, so Constance decided. What on earth she would find to do passed my comprehension, but Constance was very much afraid in case my dinners when I arrived home should not be all they ought to be. I pointed out to Constance that for five-and-twenty years previous toour marriage I had managed to struggle through life without her ministrations, but the most effective argument was that she would be seeing me every day and would thus have ocular assurance of my well-being. With less than a hundred yards dividing us, seeing me every day, and with the telephone to connect us at will, Constance might just as well, I pointed out, be in the next room. I hope that comforted her; at the nursing home I had caught a whiff of anesthetic—and that had turned me sick with fear now that the full realization of the fact that Constance would shortly be in peril of her life was forced home to me.
    So Constance was at “The Laurels,” and when I