As for the unimpeachable Adam, he was left with nothing but the uneasy fear that he was doomed to die at fifty-two.  His wife (for he got one, and a good one) soon cured him of that.

THE LONG-LOST UNCLE

On a recent visit to the Five Towns I was sitting with my old schoolmaster, who, by the way, is much younger than I am after all, in the bow window of a house overlooking that great thoroughfare, Trafalgar Road, Bursley, when a pretty woman of twenty-eight or so passed down the street.  Now the Five Towns contains more pretty women to the square mile than any other district in England (and this statement I am prepared to support by either sword or pistol).  But do you suppose that the frequency of pretty women in Hanbridge, Bursley, Knype, Longshaw and Turnhill makes them any the less remarked?  Not a bit of it.  Human nature is such that even if a man should meet forty pretty women in a walk along Trafalgar Road from Bursley to Hanbridge, he will remark them all separately, and feel exactly forty thrills.  Consequently my ever-youthful schoolmaster said to me: 

“Good-looking woman that, eh, boy?  Married three weeks ago,” he added.

A piece of information which took the keen edge off my interest in her.

“Really!” I said.  “Who is she?”

“Married to a Scotsman named Macintyre, I fancy.”

“That tells me nothing,” I said.  “Who was she?”

“Daughter of a man named Roden.”

“Not Herbert Roden?” I demanded.

“Yes.  Art director at Jacksons, Limited.”

“Well, well!” I exclaimed.  “So Herbert Roden’s got a daughter married.  Well, well!  And it seems like a week ago that he and his uncle—­you know all about that affair, of course?”

“What affair?”

“Why, the Roden affair!”

“No,” said my schoolmaster.

“You don’t mean to say you’ve never—­”

Nothing pleases a wandering native of the Five Towns more than to come back and find that he knows things concerning the Five Towns which another man who has lived there all his life doesn’t know.  In ten seconds I was digging out for my schoolmaster one of those family histories which lie embedded in the general grey soil of the past like lumps of quartz veined and streaked with the precious metal of passion and glittering here and there with the crystallizations of scandal.

“You could make a story out of that,” he said, when I had done talking and he had done laughing.

“It is a story,” I replied.  “It doesn’t want any making.”

And this is just what I told him.  I have added on a few explanations and moral reflections—­and changed the names.

I