GRACE
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even felt some anxiety about the final reckoning. But even the pros–
pect of seeing him touch the very bottom of the abyss was not enough
to offset her dread of his singularity. Better an atheist, a glutton and
a loud-mouth like Cousin Leopold than a husband with a halo! At
least she would be spared having to make excuses for him every time
she saw that dairy woman.
No decision was necessary for Duperrier to succumb to lazi–
ness. The conviction that the work he did in his office was beneath
a man of his abilities, as well as certain spells of drowsiness attendant
upon hearty eating and drinking, made laziness natural to him. And
because in his conceit he claimed to excel in all things, even in the
worst, he rapidly became the prize shirker there. The day his boss,
his patience exhausted, fired him, Duperrier received the sentence
with his hat off'.
"What's that on your forehead?" his boss asked.
"A halo, sir."
"So that's it! Instead of working, you've been fooling around
with haloes!"
When he informed his wife of his discharge, she asked him
what he intended to do next.
"I should think this would be the proper time to cultivate the
sin of avarice," he replied brightly.
It was this sin, of all the mortal sins, that was to make the
greatest demands on his will power. To a man who isn't born a miser
the vice of avarice comes harder than most, and when it is the result
of a deliberate decision there is little or nothing to distinguish it, at
least in the early stages, from that virtue of virtues, thrift. Duperrier
disciplined himself severely, as in the matter of curbing his greed,
and succeeded in carving out for himself, among his neighbors and
acquaintances, a substantial reputation for miserliness. He really loved
money for money's sake, and knew what is given to only a few to
know, the miser's unholy joy in having a creative force in his posses–
sion and preventing it from fulfilling itself. His savings, until then
the fruit of a hard-working existence, now became a means of dam–
ming up a stream of exchange and of life. This accomplishment, just
because it was so hardly come by, gave Madame Duperrier great
cause for hope. Her husband, she reasoned, had slipped so easily into
the other sins that they did not count with God, especially in view of
