“As for him, he went the usual way.  It always seems to me as if men and women were just like water; sooner or later they get back to the level from which they started—­that is, of course, generally speaking.  Here and there a drop clings where it climbs; but, taking them on the whole, pumping-up is a slow business.  Lord!  I have seen them, many of them, jolly clever they’ve thought themselves, with their diamond rings and big cigars.  ‘Wait a bit,’ I’ve always said to myself, ’there’ll come a day when you’ll walk in and be glad enough of your chop and potatoes again with your half-pint of bitter.’  And nine cases out of ten I’ve been right.  James Wrench followed the course of the majority, only a little more so:  tried to do others a precious sight sharper than himself, and got done; tried a dozen times to scramble up again, each time coming down heavier than before, till there wasn’t another spring left in him, and his only ambition victuals.  Then, of course, he thought of his wife—­it’s a wonderful domesticator, ill luck—­and wondered what she was doing.

“Fortunately for him, she’d been doing well.  Her father died and left her a bit, just a couple of hundred or so, and with this and her own savings she started with a small inn in a growing town, and had sold out again three years later at four times what she had paid for it.  She had done even better than that for herself.  She had developed a talent for cooking—­that was a settled income in itself,—­and at this time was running a small hotel in Brighton, and making it pay to a tune that would have made the shareholders of some of its bigger rivals a bit envious could they have known.

“He came to me, having found out, I don’t know how—­necessity smartens the wits, I suppose,—­that my missis still kept up a sort of friendship with her, and begged me to try and arrange a meeting between them, which I did, though I told him frankly that from what I knew his welcome wouldn’t be much more enthusiastic than what he’d any right to expect.  But he was always of a sanguine disposition; and borrowing his fare and an old greatcoat of mine, he started off, evidently thinking that all his troubles were over.

“But they weren’t exactly.  The Married Women’s Property Act had altered things a bit, and Master James found himself greeted without any suggestion of tenderness by a business-like woman of thirty-six or thereabouts, and told to wait in the room behind the bar till she could find time to talk to him.

“She kept him waiting there for three-quarters of an hour, just sufficient time to take the side out of him; and then she walks in and closes the door behind her.

“‘I’d say you hadn’t changed hardly a day, Susan,’ says he, ’if it wasn’t that you’d grown handsomer than ever.’

“I guess he’d been turning that over in his mind during the three-quarters of an hour.  It was his fancy that he knew a bit about women.