“Then you were reading it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, her eyes going dreamy again.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” murmured Mrs. Wilkins.

“Wonderful,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.  Her face, which had lit up, faded into patience again.  “Very wonderful,” she said.  “But it’s no use wasting one’s time thinking of such things.”

“Oh, but it is,” was Mrs. Wilkins’s quick, surprising reply; surprising because it was so much unlike the rest of her—­the characterless coat and skirt, the crumpled hat, the undecided wisp of hair straggling out, “And just the considering of them is worth while in itself—­such a change from Hampstead—­and sometimes I believe—­I really do believe—­if one considers hard enough one gets things.”

Mrs. Arbuthnot observed her patiently.  In what category would she, supposing she had to, put her?

“Perhaps,” she said, leaning forward a little, “you will tell me your name.  If we are to be friends”—­she smiled her grave smile—­“as I hope we are, we had better begin at the beginning.”

“Oh yes—­how kind of you.  I’m Mrs. Wilkins,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “I don’t expect,” she added, flushing, as Mrs. Arbuthnot said nothing, “that it conveys anything to you.  Sometimes it—­it doesn’t seem to convey anything to me either.  But”—­she looked round with a movement of seeking help—­“I am Mrs. Wilkins.”

She did not like her name.  It was a mean, small name, with a kind of facetious twist, she thought, about its end like the upward curve of a pugdog’s tail.  There it was, however.  There was no doing anything with it.  Wilkins she was and Wilkins she would remain; and though her husband encouraged her to give it on all occasions as Mrs. Mellersh-Wilkins she only did that when he was within earshot, for she thought Mellersh made Wilkins worse, emphasizing it in the way Chatsworth on the gate-posts of a villa emphasizes the villa.

When first he suggested she should add Mellersh she had objected for the above reason, and after a pause—­Mellersh was much too prudent to speak except after a pause, during which presumably he was taking a careful mental copy of his coming observation—­he said, much displeased, “But I am not a villa,” and looked at her as he looks who hopes, for perhaps the hundredth time, that he may not have married a fool.

Of course he was not a villa, Mrs. Wilkins assured him; she had never supposed he was; she had not dreamed of meaning . . . she was only just thinking . . .

The more she explained the more earnest became Mellersh’s hope, familiar to him by this time, for he had then been a husband for two years, that he might not by any chance have married a fool; and they had a prolonged quarrel, if that can be called a quarrel which is conducted with dignified silence on one side and earnest apology on the other, as to whether or no Mrs. Wilkins had intended to suggest that Mr. Wilkins was a villa.