Although the month was July, Ruth wore a kind of shawl over the tea-gown.  It was not a shawl, Denry noted; it was merely about two yards of very thin muslin.  He puzzled himself as to its purpose.  It could not be for warmth, for it would not have helped to melt an icicle.  Could it be meant to fulfil the same function as muslin in a confectioner’s shop?  She was pale.  Her voice was weak and had an imploring quality.

She led him, not into the inhospitable wooden academy, but into a very small room which, like herself, was dressed in muslin and bows of ribbon.  Photographs of amiable men and women decorated the pinkish-green walls.  The mantelpiece was concealed in drapery as though it had been a sin.  A writing-desk as green as a leaf stood carelessly in one corner; on the desk a vase containing some Cape gooseberries.  In the middle of the room a small table, on the table a spirit-lamp in full blast, and on the lamp a kettle practising scales; a tray occupied the remainder of the table.  There were two easy chairs; Ruth sank delicately into one, and Denry took the other with precautions.

He was nervous.  Nothing equals muslin for imparting nervousness to the naive.  But he felt pleased.

“Not much of the Widow Hullins touch about this!” he reflected privately.

And he wished that all rent-collecting might be done with such ease, and amid such surroundings, as this particular piece of rent-collecting.  He saw what a fine thing it was to be a free man, under orders from nobody; not many men in Bursley were in a position to accept invitations to four o’clock tea at a day’s notice.  Further 5 per cent. on thirty pounds was thirty shillings, so that if he stayed an hour—­and he meant to stay an hour—­he would, while enjoying himself, be earning money steadily at the rate of sixpence a minute.

It was the ideal of a business career.

When the kettle, having finished its scales, burst into song with an accompaniment of castanets and vapour, and Ruth’s sleeves rose and fell as she made the tea, Denry acknowledged frankly to himself that it was this sort of thing, and not the Brougham Street sort of thing, that he was really born for.  He acknowledged to himself humbly that this sort of thing was “life,” and that hitherto he had had no adequate idea of what “life” was.  For, with all his ability as a card and a rising man, with all his assiduous frequenting of the Sports Club, he had not penetrated into the upper domestic strata of Bursley society.  He had never been invited to any house where, as he put it, he would have had to mind his p’s and q’s.  He still remained the kind of man whom you familiarly chat with in the street and club, and no more.  His mother’s fame as a flannel-washer was against him; Brougham Street was against him; and, chiefly, his poverty was against him.  True, he had gorgeously given a house away to an aged widow!  True, he succeeded in transmitting to his acquaintances a vague