“Dear me,” said the College of Pedagogues gravely, and regarding Mr. Lewisham over gold-rimmed glasses.  “Dear me!  And I am more than twice your age, and I am not married at all.  One-and-twenty!  Have you—­have you been married long?”

“A few weeks,” said Lewisham.

“That’s very remarkable,” said the College of Pedagogues.  “Very interesting.... Really! Your wife must be a very courageous young person....  Excuse me!  You know—­You will really have a hard fight for a position.  However—­it certainly makes you eligible for girls’ schools; it does do that.  To a certain extent, that is.”

The evidently enhanced respect of the College of Pedagogues pleased Lewisham extremely.  But his encounter with the Medical, Scholastic, and Clerical Agency that holds by Waterloo Bridge was depressing again, and after that he set out to walk home.  Long before he reached home he was tired, and his simple pride in being married and in active grapple with an unsympathetic world had passed.  His surrender on the religious question had left a rankling bitterness behind it; the problem of the clothes was acutely painful.  He was still far from a firm grasp of the fact that his market price was under rather than over one hundred pounds a year, but that persuasion was gaining ground in his mind.

The day was a greyish one, with a dull cold wind, and a nail in one of his boots took upon itself to be objectionable.  Certain wild shots and disastrous lapses in his recent botanical examination, that he had managed to keep out of his mind hitherto, forced their way on his attention.  For the first time since his marriage he harboured premonitions of failure.

When he got in he wanted to sit down at once in the little creaky chair by the fire, but Ethel came flitting from the newly bought typewriter with arms extended and prevented him.  “Oh!—­it has been dull,” she said.

He missed the compliment. “I haven’t had such a giddy time that you should grumble,” he said, in a tone that was novel to her.  He disengaged himself from her arms and sat down.  He noticed the expression of her face.

“I’m rather tired,” he said by way of apology.  “And there’s a confounded nail I must hammer down in my boot.  It’s tiring work hunting up these agents, but of course it’s better to go and see them.  How have you been getting on?”

“All right,” she said, regarding him.  And then, “You are tired.  We’ll have some tea.  And—­let me take off your boot for you, dear.  Yes—­I will.”

She rang the bell, bustled out of the room, called for tea at the staircase, came back, pulled out Madam Gadow’s ungainly hassock and began unlacing his boot.  Lewisham’s mood changed.  “You are a trump, Ethel,” he said; “I’m hanged if you’re not.”  As the laces flicked he bent forward and kissed her ear.  The unlacing was suspended and there were reciprocal endearments....