“He grumbled at her accent, which, seeing that his own was acquired in Lime-house and finished off in the Minories, was just the sort of thing a fool would do.  And he insisted on her reading all the society novels as they came out—­you know the sort I mean,—­where everybody snaps everybody else’s head off, and all the proverbs are upside down; people leave them about the hotels when they’ve done with them, and one gets into the habit of dipping into them when one’s nothing better to do.  His hope was that she might, with pains, get to talk like these books.  That was his ideal.

“She did her best, but of course the more she got away from herself the more absurd she became; and the rubbish and worse that he had about him would ridicule her more or less openly.  And he, instead of kicking them out into the mews—­which could have been done easily without Grosvenor Square knowing anything about it, and thereby having its high-class feelings hurt—­he would blame her when they had all gone, just as if it was her fault that she was the daughter of a respectable bootmaker in the Mile End Road instead of something more likely than not turned out of the third row of the ballet because it couldn’t dance, and didn’t want to learn.

“He played a bit in the City, and won at first, and that swelled his head worse than ever.  It also brought him a good deal of sympathy from an Italian Countess, the sort you find at Homburg, and that generally speaking is a widow.  Her chief sorrow was for society—­that in him was losing an ornament.  She explained to him how an accomplished and experienced woman could help a man to gain admittance into the tiptop circles, which, according to her, were just thirsting for him.  As a waiter, he had his share of brains, and it’s a business that requires more insight than perhaps you’d fancy, if you don’t want to waste your time on a rabbit-skin coat and a paste ring, and give the burnt sole to the real gent.  But in the hands of this swell mob he was, of course, just the young man from the country; and the end of it was that he played the game down pretty low.

“She—­not the Countess, I shouldn’t like you to have that idea, but his wife—­came to be pretty friendly with my missus later on, and that’s how I got to know the details.  He comes to her one day looking pretty sheepish-like, as one can well believe, and maybe he’d been drinking a bit to give himself courage.

“‘We ain’t been getting along too well together of late, have we, Susan?’ says he.

“‘We ain’t seen much of one another,’ she answers; ’but I agree with you, we don’t seem to enjoy it much when we do.’

“‘It ain’t your fault,’ says he.

“‘I’m glad you think that,’ she answers; ’it shows me you ain’t quite as foolish as I was beginning to think you.’

“‘Of course, I didn’t know when I married you,’ he goes on, ’as I was going to come into this money.’

“‘No, nor I either,’ says she, ‘or you bet it wouldn’t have happened.’