"How well off does your wife think I ought to be ?" "She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman happy." "Look here, Julian, _is_ it an object for a man to live for, making some woman happy ?" "Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him.

"What else is there?
It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better off than you found it.

It suits _me_." He was looking, indeed, particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had brought him.

A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness.

"I reckon Clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for your case.