“Do you really believe what that woman said?” Stephen asked.

“Well,” she repeated, “one never knows.”

“Because if you do, I’ll tell you something.”

“What?” Vera demanded.

At this juncture Stephen committed an error of tactics.  He might have let her continue in the fear of his death, and thus remained on velvet (subject to occasional outbreaks) for the rest of his life.  But he gave himself utterly away.

“She told me I should live till I was ninety,” said he.  “So you can’t be a widow for quite half a century, and you’ll be eighty yourself then.”

IV

Within twenty-four hours she was at him about the balcony.

“The summer will be lovely,” she said, in reply to his argument about climate.

“Rubbish,” she said, in reply to his argument about safety.

“Who cares for your old breakfast-room?” she said, in reply to his argument about darkness at breakfast.

“We will have trees planted on that side—­big elms,” she said, in reply to his argument about the smoke of the Five Towns spoiling the view.

Whereupon Stephen definitely and clearly enunciated that he should not build a balcony.

“Oh, but you must!” she protested.

“A balcony is quite impossible,” said Stephen, with his firmest masculinity.

“You’ll see if it’s impossible,” said she, “when I’m that widow.”

The curious may be interested to know that she has already begun to plant trees.

THE CAT AND CUPID

I

The secret history of the Ebag marriage is now printed for the first time.  The Ebag family, who prefer their name to be accented on the first syllable, once almost ruled Oldcastle, which is a clean and conceited borough, with long historical traditions, on the very edge of the industrial, democratic and unclean Five Towns.  The Ebag family still lives in the grateful memory of Oldcastle, for no family ever did more to preserve the celebrated Oldcastilian superiority in social, moral and religious matters over the vulgar Five Towns.  The episodes leading to the Ebag marriage could only have happened in Oldcastle.  By which I mean merely that they could not have happened in any of the Five Towns.  In the Five Towns that sort of thing does not occur.  I don’t know why, but it doesn’t.  The people are too deeply interested in football, starting prices, rates, public parks, sliding scales, excursions to Blackpool, and municipal shindies, to concern themselves with organists as such.  In the Five Towns an organist may be a sanitary inspector or an auctioneer on Mondays.  In Oldcastle an organist is an organist, recognized as such in the streets.  No one ever heard of an organist in the Five Towns being taken up and petted by a couple of old ladies.  But this may occur at Oldcastle.  It, in fact, did.