“Did you now!” murmured the tobacconist.  “She’s rare and dirty.”

“I like her to be dirty,” said Priam stoutly.  “She ought to be dirty.  She wouldn’t be the same if she were clean.”

“I don’t hold with dirt,” said the tobacconist calmly.  “She’d be better if she had a bath of a Saturday night like other folks.”

“Well,” said Priam, “I want an ounce of the usual.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the tobacconist, putting down three-halfpence change out of sixpence as Priam thanked him for the packet.

Nothing whatever in such a dialogue!  Yet Priam left the shop with a distinct feeling that life was good.  And he plunged into High Street, lost himself in crowds of perambulators and nice womanly women who were bustling honestly about in search of food or raiment.  Many of them carried little red books full of long lists of things which they and their admirers and the offspring of mutual affection had eaten or would shortly eat.  In the High Street all was luxury:  not a necessary in the street.  Even the bakers’ shops were a mass of sultana and Berlin pancakes.  Illuminated calendars, gramophones, corsets, picture postcards, Manilla cigars, bridge-scorers, chocolate, exotic fruit, and commodious mansions—­these seemed to be the principal objects offered for sale in High Street.  Priam bought a sixpenny edition of Herbert Spencer’s Essays for four-pence-halfpenny, and passed on to Putney Bridge, whose noble arches divided a first storey of vans and omnibuses from a ground-floor of barges and racing eights.  And he gazed at the broad river and its hanging gardens, and dreamed; and was wakened by the roar of an electric train shooting across the stream on a red causeway a few yards below him.  And, miles off, he could descry the twin towers of the Crystal Palace, more marvellous than mosques!

“Astounding!” he murmured joyously.  He had not a care in the world; and Putney was all that Alice had painted it.  In due time, when bells had pealed to right and to left of him, he went home to her.

Collapse of the Putney System

Now, just at the end of lunch, over the last stage of which they usually sat a long time, Alice got up quickly, in the midst of her Stilton, and, going to the mantelpiece, took a letter therefrom.

“I wish you’d look at that, Henry,” she said, handing him the letter.  “It came this morning, but of course I can’t be bothered with that sort of thing in the morning.  So I put it aside.”

He accepted the letter, and unfolded it with the professional all-knowing air which even the biggest male fool will quite successfully put on in the presence of a woman if consulted about business.  When he had unfolded the thing—­it was typed on stiff, expensive, quarto paper—­he read it.  In the lives of beings like Priam Farll and Alice a letter such as that letter is a terrible event, unique, earth-arresting; simple recipients are apt, on receiving it, to imagine that the Christian era has come to an end.  But tens of thousands of similar letters are sent out from the City every day, and the City thinks nothing of them.