“How much have you got in Cohoon’s?” Priam asked Alice, after they had looked through the report together.

“All I have is in Cohoon’s,” said she, “except this house.  Father left it like that.  He always said there was nothing like a brewery.  I’ve heard him say many and many a time a brewery was better than consols.  I think there’s 200 L5 shares.  Yes, that’s it.  But of course they’re worth much more than that.  They’re worth about L12 each.  All I know is they bring me in L150 a year as regular as the clock.  What’s that there, after ’broke up in confusion’?”

She pointed with her finger to a paragraph, and he read in a low voice the fluctuations of Cohoon’s Ordinary Shares during the afternoon.  They had finished at L6 5s.  Mrs. Henry Leek had lost over L1,000 in about half-a-day.

“They’ve always brought me in L150 a year,” she insisted, as though she had been saying:  “It’s always been Christmas Day on the 25th of December, and of course it will be the same this year.”

“It doesn’t look as if they’d bring you in anything this time,” said he.

“Oh, but Henry!” she protested.

Beer had failed!  That was the truth of it.  Beer had failed.  Who would have guessed that beer could fail in England?  The wisest, the most prudent men in Lombard Street had put their trust in beer, as the last grand bulwark of the nation; and even beer had failed.  The foundations of England’s greatness were, if not gone, going.  Insufficient to argue bad management, indiscreet purchases of licences at inflated prices!  In the excellent old days a brewery would stand an indefinite amount of bad management!  Times were changed.  The British workman, caught in a wave of temperance, could no longer be relied upon to drink!  It was the crown of his sins against society.  Trade unions were nothing to this latest caprice of his, which spread desolation in a thousand genteel homes.  Alice wondered what her father would have said, had he lived.  On the whole, she was glad that he did not happen to be alive.  The shock to him would have been too rude.  The floor seemed to be giving way under Alice, melting into a sort of bog that would swallow up her and her husband.  For years, without any precise information, but merely by instinct, she had felt that England, beneath the surface, was not quite the island it had been—­and here was the awful proof.

She gazed at her husband, as a wife ought to gaze at her husband in a crisis.  His thoughts were much vaguer than hers, his thoughts about money being always extremely vague.

“Suppose you went up to the City and saw Mr. What’s-his-name?” she suggested, meaning the signatory of the letter.

“Me!”

It was a cry of the soul aghast, a cry drawn out of him sharply, by a most genuine cruel alarm.  Him to go up to the City to interview a solicitor!  Why, the poor dear woman must be demented!  He could not have done it for a million pounds.  The thought of it made him sick, raising the whole of his lunch to his throat, as by some sinister magic.