Now the blow had fallen. Everything they possessed was gone and he knew of no way in which he could earn a living to support his wife and family, and his equally penniless parents. He had never learned to work; he knew no trade or business; he was quite unfit, from a lifetime of soft living, for hard manual labor, and the awful realization broke over him that he was completely inadequate for this new and terrible situation unable to face life as it now faced him. The thought of his wife and children left utterly alone and penniless withheld him from committing suicide at once, but the realization that he himself was unable to do anything for them, even if he remained with them, was so terrible that he felt he could not bear it. He had been suddenly stripped of everything in which he had trusted, and now found himself so despicably incompetent and inadequate that it seemed a disgrace to remain alive.

His wife, Superiority, was equally terrified by the discovery of her own unfitness to face life and its demands when deprived of all the service and ease and pleasures with which wealth had supplied her. Her reactions, however, differed from those of her husband. Perhaps it was the inner decision which she had made a few days ago to continue to love Grace and Glory, because of the passionate longing in her heart—which she had at last admitted to herself—to know the Shepherd, that made her at this time, when her whole life lay in ruins about her, think, with a desperate, almost despairing hope, of appealing to the Shepherd for help. When at last her half-crazed husband could be brought to listen to her, and she made the suggestion that in their utter loss of all things they should at last turn to the One they had so long disdained and rejected, Pride’s reaction was one of agonized horror and shame.

“How can we?” he almost shrieked at his wife. “How can we go crawling and groveling to him now? Now that we are ruined and absolutely destitute, how can we implore his help after scorning him all these years when we were wealthy and secure? We can at least save ourselves that last, complete humiliation of groveling before him as beggars, pleading for a pittance flung us out of pity, and likely being despised and turned away!”

“But we are beggars!” said Superiority in a trembling voice, “and is it not better to face the fact, Pride, and to acknowledge ourselves to be what we really are? Unless the Shepherd will accept us and teach us some kind of useful work, however menial, I don’t see what other hope there is for us.”