He kissed her and went off.

When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him.  He was tired and wanted to go home.  Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel’s face bent over her sewing?  He saw little enough of her anyway.

At the door of the club he halted.  Inside, the crowd was laughing, shouting jests, dicing for cocktails.  Suddenly he turned and ran.

He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force seemed to draw him home.  On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly.

At last he reached the modest little suburb.  He hurried along the street and had almost entered his gate when he paused.

Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably by the lamp.  She was reading, and the cat was in her lap.  His heart leaped with a great throb.  But how could he go in now?  It was barely eight o’clock.  After all his talk about a man’s need of relaxation and masculine comradeship—­why, she would never stop laughing!  He turned and tiptoed away.

That evening was a nightmare for Simmons.  Opposite his house was a little suburban park, and thither he took himself.  For a long while he sat on a bench cursing.  Twice he started for the trolley, and again returned.  It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced his light coat and he sneezed.  Up and down the little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar.  Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a box of crackers.

At last—­it seemed years—­the church chimes struck ten and he saw the lights go out in his house.  He forced himself to make twenty-five more trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer.  Shivering with weariness and cold, he went home.

He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs.  He leaned over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.

“What time is it, dear?” she murmured.  “You’re early, aren’t you?”

“One o’clock,” he lied bravely—­and just then the dining-room clock struck half-past ten and supported him.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Bully—­perfectly bully,” he said.  “There’s nothing like a night with the boys now and then.”

THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE

I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc.  They found him in the cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine.  He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of laughter the fun went forward.  The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety—­improvising verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to Saxon phlegm.  My friends have always remembered it as one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.