The Tolerated Husband may have been at one time an officer in a good regiment.  Having married, he finds that his pay, combined with a moderate private income, and a generous allowance of indebtedness, due to the gratification of expensive tastes, is insufficient to maintain him in that position of comfort to which he conceives himself to be entitled.  He therefore abandons the career of arms, and becomes one of those who attempt spasmodically to redeem commercial professions from the taint of mere commercialism by becoming commercial themselves.  It is certain that the gilded society which turns up a moderately aristocratic nose at trade and tradesmen, looks with complete indulgence upon an ex-officer who dabbles in wine, or associates himself with a new scheme for the easy manufacture of working-men’s boots.  An agency to a Fire and Life Assurance Society is, of course, above reproach, and the Stock Exchange, an institution which, in the imagination of reckless fools, provides as large a cover as charity, is positively enviable—­a reputation which it owes to the fancied ease with which half-a-crown is converted into one hundred thousand pounds by the mere stroke of an office pen.

The Tolerated Husband tries all these methods, one after another, with a painful monotony of failure in each.  Yet, somehow or other, he still keeps up appearances, and manages to live in a certain style not far removed from luxury.  He entertains his friends at elaborate dinners, both at home and at expensive restaurants; he is a frequent visitor at theatres, where he often pays for the stalls of many others as well as for his own.  He takes a small house in the country, and fills it with guests, to whom he offers admirable wines, and excellent cigars.  His wife is always beautifully dressed, and glitters with an array of jewels which make her the envy of many a steady leader of fashion.  The world begins to ask, vaguely at first, but with a constantly increasing persistence, how the thing is done.  Respectability and malice combine to whisper a truthful answer.  Starting from the axiom that the precarious income which is produced by a want of success in many branches of business cannot support luxury or purchase diamonds, they arrive, per saltum, at the conclusion that there must be some third party to provide the wife and the husband with means for their existence.  His name is soon fixed upon, and his motives readily inferred.  It can be none other than the husband’s rich bachelor friend, the same who accompanies the pair on all their expeditions, who is a constant guest at their house, and is known to be both lavish and determined in the prosecution of any object on which he has set his heart.  His heart, in this instance, is set upon his friend’s wife, and the obstacles in his way do not seem to be very formidable.  The case, indeed, is soon too manifest for any one but a born idiot to feign ignorance of it.  The husband is not a born idiot—­he either sees