All kinds of problems crowded round him.

He went out for a stroll to escape the problems.  But they accompanied him.  He walked through exactly the same streets as had delighted him in the morning.  And they had ceased to delight him.  This surely could not be ideal Putney that he was in!  It must be some other place of the same name.  The mismanagement of a brewery a hundred and fifty miles from London; the failure of the British working-man to drink his customary pints in several scattered scores of public-houses, had most unaccountably knocked the bottom out of the Putney system of practical philosophy.  Putney posters were now merely disgusting, Putney trade gross and futile, the tobacconist a narrow-minded and stupid bourgeois; and so on.

Alice and he met on their doorstep, each in the act of pulling out a latchkey.

“Oh!” she said, when they were inside, “it’s done for!  There’s no mistake—­it’s done for!  We shan’t get a penny this year, not one penny!  And he doesn’t think there’ll be anything next year either!  And the shares’ll go down yet, he says.  I never heard of such a thing in all my life!  Did you?”

He admitted sympathetically that he had not.

After she had been upstairs and come down again her mood suddenly changed.  “Well,” she smiled, “whether we get anything or not, it’s tea-time.  So we’ll have tea.  I’ve no patience with worrying.  I said I should make pastry after tea, and I will too.  See if I don’t!”

The tea was perhaps slightly more elaborate than usual.

After tea he heard her singing in the kitchen.  And he was moved to go and look at her.  There she was, with her sleeves turned back, and a large pinafore apron over her rich bosom, kneading flour.  He would have liked to approach her and kiss her.  But he never could accomplish feats of that kind at unusual moments.

“Oh!” she laughed.  “You can look! I’m not worrying.  I’ve no patience with worrying.”

Later in the afternoon he went out; rather like a person who has reasons for leaving inconspicuously.  He had made a great, a critical resolve.  He passed furtively down Werter Road into the High Street, and then stood a moment outside Stawley’s stationery shop, which is also a library, an emporium of leather-bags, and an artists’-colourman’s.  He entered Stawley’s blushing, trembling—­he a man of fifty who could not see his own toes—­and asked for certain tubes of colour.  An energetic young lady who seemed to know all about the graphic arts endeavoured to sell to him a magnificent and complicated box of paints, which opened out into an easel and a stool, and contained a palette of a shape preferred by the late Edwin Long, R.A., a selection of colours which had been approved by the late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., and a patent drying-oil which (she said) had been used by Whistler.  Priam Farll got away from the shop without this apparatus for the confection of masterpieces, but he did not get