“He isn’t the man to marry at all.”

“Did you expect him to live like an anchorite, then?”

“I didn’t expect anything.  He might have lived as he liked, provided he didn’t ruin himself as he’s doing now.”

And though Maddox now saw that young Delilah frequently, and always at her prettiest and her best, he did not change his opinion.

CHAPTER LIII

It was now the third week in September, and the wedding was fixed for the twenty-fifth of October.  Everything was fixed, even Flossie’s ideas on the subject of her trousseau.  There never was a little woman so unwavering in her choice of such things as clothes and furniture.  To be married in ivory white, and to go away in powder blue; to have a drawing-room furnished in imitation rosewood and tapestry, and a dining-room in stamped velvet and black oak (imitation, too), had been Flossie’s firm determination from the first.  It saves endless time and contention when a young woman so absolutely knows her own mind.

Not but what she required approval and support in her decisions; otherwise she would have been hardly recognizable as a young woman.  And for Rickman to go shopping with the Beaver in Tottenham Court Road, to follow her undeviating course through the furniture galleries, to note the infallible instinct by which she made for and seized upon the objects of her choice, to see the austerity with which she resisted the seductions of the salesman who sought to entangle her with a more expensive article, the calmness of her mind in dealing with the most intricate problems of measurement and price, was to be led a helpless captive in a triumph of practical ability.  Ability, good Lord! was there ever anything like Flossie’s grasp of all facts that can be expressed in figures?  His brain reeled before the terrifying velocity of her mental arithmetic.  What a little woman it was to do sums in the top of its head!

Not that she dragged him on the chain for ever.  There were idyllic resting-places, delicious, thrilling pauses in her progress; when she tried every chair in succession in the drawing-room suite; when she settled herself in the tapestry one, before the little rosewood tea-table (spread, for the heightening of the illusion, with a tea-service all complete); when she pretended to pour out tea, smiling over the tea-pot in the prettiest delight.  With such a smile she would welcome him, with such a smile she would pour out his tea when he came back from Fleet Street to the home that was to be. (It did not occur to him that at the moment Flossie was only smiling at the tea-pot.) Though he stood aloof from the anticipatory scene, as he looked at her he grew positively weak with tenderness.  In everything Flossie had her way.  When they climbed (as they inevitably did) to the upper galleries he indeed offered some show of resistance when she insisted on choosing a terrible