things, women; one can never tell what they are made of from the taste of them.  And while I was there, it having been a good season for both of them, they thought they’d risk it and get married.  They did the sensible thing, he coming back to his work after the week’s holiday, and she to hers; the only difference being that they took a couple of rooms of their own in Middleton Row, from where in summer-time you can catch the glimpse of a green tree or two, and slept out.

“The first few months they were as happy as a couple in a play, she thinking almost as much of him as he thought of himself, which must have been a comfort to both of them, and he as proud of her as if he made her himself.  And then some fifteenth cousin or so of his, a man he had never heard of before, died in New Zealand and left him a fortune.

“That was the beginning of his troubles, and hers too.  I don’t say it was enough to buy a peerage, but to a man accustomed to dream of half-crown tips it seemed an enormous fortune.  Anyhow, it was sufficient to turn his head and give him ideas above his station.  His first move, of course, was to chuck his berth and set fire to his dress suit, which, being tolerably greasy, burned well.  Had he stopped there nobody could have blamed him.  I’ve often thought myself that I would willingly give ten years of my life, provided anybody wanted them, which I don’t see how they should, to put my own behind the fire.  But he didn’t.  He took a house in a mews, with the front door in a street off Grosvenor Square, furnished it like a second-class German restaurant, dressed himself like a bookmaker, and fancied that with the help of a few shady City chaps and a broken-down swell or two he had gathered round him, he was fairly on the road to Park Lane and the House of Lords.

“And the only thing that struck him as being at all in his way was his wife.  In her cap and apron, or her Sunday print she had always looked as dainty and fetching a little piece of goods as a man could wish to be seen out with.  Dressed according to the advice of his new-found friends, of course she looked like nothing else so much as a barn-yard chicken in turkey-cock’s feathers.  He was shocked to find that her size in gloves was seven-and-a-quarter, and in boots something over four, and that sort of thing naturally irritates a woman more even than finding fault with her immortal soul.  I guess for about a year he made her life pretty well a burden for her, trying to bring her up to the standard of the Saturday-to-Monday-at-Brighton set with which he had surrounded himself, or which, to speak more correctly, had got round him.  She’d a precious sight more gumption than he had ever possessed, and if he had listened to her instead of insisting upon her listening to him it would have been better for him.  But there are some men who think that if you have a taste for champagne and the ballet that proves you are intended by nature for a nob, and he was one of them; and any common-sense suggestion of hers only convinced him of her natural unfitness for an exalted station.