These reflections have surged up in my brain as I contemplate¹ the recent case of my acquaintance, Mr. Omicron, and they are preliminary to a study of that interesting case. Scarce a week ago Omicron was sitting in the Omicron drawing-room alone with Mrs. Omicron. It was an average Omicron evening. Omicron is aged² thirty-two. He is neither successful nor unsuccessful, and no human perspicacity³ can say whether twenty years hence he will be successful or unsuccessful. But anybody can see that he is already on the way to be a plain, well-balanced man. Somewhat earlier than usual he is losing the fanciful capricious qualities and settling down into the stiff backbone⁴ of the nation.  
Conversation was not abundant.
 
Said Mrs. Omicron suddenly, with an ingratiating accent:
 
“What about that ring that I was to have?”
 
There was a pause, in which every muscle of the man’s body, and especially the facial muscles, and every secret fibre of his soul, perceptibly stiffened⁵. And then Omicron answered, curtly⁶, rebuttingly, reprovingly, snappishly, finishingly:
 
“I don’t know.”
 
And took up his newspaper, whose fragile crackling wall defended him from attack every bit as well as a screen of twelve-inch armour-plating.
 
The subject was dropped.
 
It had endured about ten seconds. But those ten seconds marked an epoch⁷ in Omicron’s career as a husband—and he knew it not. He knew it not, but the whole of his conjugal⁸ future had hung evenly in the balance during those ten seconds, and then slid slightly but definitely—to the wrong side.
 
Of course, there was more in the affair than appeared on the surface. At dinner th............