As soon as he was out of the station, his troubles began again.  A veil seemed to have been torn from before his eyes.  Just as in London every face into which he had looked, every building which he had passed, had seemed to him unfamiliar, appealing to an altered system of impressions, so here, during that brief walk, a new disgust was born in him.  The showy-looking main street with its gingerbread buildings, all new and glittering with paint, appalled him.  The larger villas—­self-conscious types all reeking with plaster and false decorations—­set him shivering.  He turned into his own street and his heart sank.  Something had indeed touched his eyes and he saw new and terrible things.  The row of houses looked as though they had come out of a child’s playbox.  They were all untrue, shoddy, uninviting.  The waste space on the other side of the unmade street, a repository for all the rubbish of the neighborhood, brought a groan to his lips.  He stopped before the gate of his own little dwelling.  There were yellow curtains in the window, tied back with red velvet.  Even with the latch of the gate in his hand, he hesitated.  A child in a spotted velveteen suit and a soiled lace collar, who had been playing in the street, greeted him with an amazed shout and then ran on ahead.

“Mummy, come and look at Daddy!” the boy shrieked.  “He’s cut off all the hair from his lip and he’s got such funny clothes on!  Do come and look at his hat!”

The child was puny, unprepossessing, and dirty.  Worse tragedy than this, Burton knew it.  The woman who presently appeared to gaze at him with open-mouthed wonder, was pretentiously and untidily dressed, with some measure of good looks woefully obscured by a hard and unsympathetic expression.  Burton knew these things also.  It flashed into his mind as he stood there that her first attraction to him had been because she resembled his ill-conceived idea of an actress.  As a matter of fact, she resembled much more closely her cousin, who was a barmaid.  Burton looked into the tragedy of his life and shivered.

“What in the name of wonder’s the meaning of this, Alfred?” his better half demanded.  “What are you standing there for, looking all struck of a heap?”

He made no reply.  Speech, for the moment, was absolutely impossible.  She stood and stared at him, her arms akimbo, disapproval written in her face.  Her hair was exceedingly untidy and there was a smut upon her cheek.  A soiled lace collar, fastened with an imitation diamond brooch, had burst asunder.

“What’s come to your moustache?” she demanded.  “And why are you dressed like—­like a house-painter on a Sunday?”

Burton found his first gleam of consolation.  A newly-discovered sense of humor soothed him inexplicably.

“Sorry you don’t like my clothes,” he replied.  “You’ll get used to them.”

“Get used to them!” his better half repeated, almost hysterically.  “Do you mean to say you are going about like that?”