Not that, in any conscious way, he had grown tired of Jessica. It was rather that his attitude towards her had leveled into a passive acceptance of her status as his wife; no flicker of impulse disturbed something which was not quite serenity and not quite boredom either. This condition, which some people flatteringly call happiness, David did not call anything; he did not even think about it. He just did his job, year by year, and would have been tolerably content with the wrong sort of wife if only he could have had the right sort of child. It didn’t seem, as the years went by, that Gerald was going to be that. There was a nervousness in the boy that was almost pathological, and none the less so because Jessica regarded it as mere naughtiness. Upon this point of interpretation David and Jessica had their rare quarrels; for the boy’s tantrums stirred David to a degree of patience which to Jessica was an added irritation. Curious foolery, so it was reported by those who had access to overlooking windows, went on in the Shawgate garden between father and son — foolery in which it would have been hard to say whose behavior was the more fantastically infantile. Jessica always thought the whole thing was rather disgraceful. But when Gerald developed one of his notorious crying fits it was David who would devote hours to pacifying him, fighting the enemy with fear-stilling hands; for David knew the terror a child can have when a shadow climbs a wall, or when a train screams through a station, or when, in some story book, a page is turned shudderingly upon a hated picture. And he knew how terror can sometimes fascinate till the dreaded thing is loved and the mind twists into lonely corridors; he knew, too, that nothing is terrible if it is not felt to be. For there was that picture of angels looking like a skull; by some chance the boy liked it, and was overjoyed when David produced a real skull — relic of student days — to give meaning to what had hitherto been a merely entertaining mystery. And David, demonstrating thus, was inspired to do so by an intrepidity he could hardly explain — a desire to establish one thing at least of which the boy should never be afraid; and that was Death.