me, I don’t know; we were so different in every way.  Well, it was partly my nature and partly what I’d gone through; we hadn’t been married more than a month or two when I began to find fault with her, and from that day on she could never please me.  I earned five-and-twenty shillings a week, and I’d made up my mind that we must save out of it.  I wouldn’t let her work; no, what she had to do was to keep the home on as little as possible, and always have everything clean and straight when I got back at night.  But Jenny hadn’t the same ideas about things as I had.  She couldn’t pinch and pare, and our plans of saving came to nothing.  It grew worse as the children were horn.  The more need there was for carefulness, the more heedless Jenny seemed to get.  And it was my fault, mine from beginning to end.  Another man would have been gentle with her and showed her kindly when she was wrong, and have been thankful for the love she gave him, whatever her faults.  That wasn’t my way.  I got angry, and made her life a burden to her.  I must have things done exactly as I wished; if not, there was no end to my fault-finding.  And yet, if you’ll believe it, I loved my wife as truly as man ever did.  Jenny couldn’t understand that—­and how should she?  At last she began to deceive me in all sorts of little things; she got into debt with shop-people, she showed me false accounts, she pawned things without my knowing.  Last of all, she began to drink.  Our fourth child was born just at that time; Jenny had a bad illness, and I believe it set her mind wrong.  I lost all control of her, and she used to say if it wasn’t for the children she’d go and leave me.  One morning we quarrelled very badly, and I did as I’d threatened to—­I walked about the streets all the night that followed, never coming home.  I went to work next day, but at dinner-time I got frightened and ran home just to speak a word.  Little Mike, the eldest, was playing on the stairs, and he said his mother was asleep.  I went into the room, and saw Jenny lying on the bed dressed.  There was something queer in the way her arms were stretched out.  When I got near I saw she was dead.  She’d taken poison.

’And it was I had killed her, just as much as if I’d put the poison to her lips.  All because I thought myself such a wise fellow, because I’d resolved to live more prudently than other men of my kind did.  I wanted to save money for the future—­out of five-and-twenty shillings a week.  Many and many a day I starved myself to try and make up for expenses of the home.  Sidney, you remember that man we once went to hear lecture, the man that talked of nothing but the thriftlessness of the poor, and how it was their own fault they suffered?  I was very near telling you my story when we came away that night.  Why, look; I myself was just the kind of poor man that would have suited that lecturer.  And what came of it?  If I’d let my poor Jenny go her own way from the first, we should have had hard times now and then, but there’d have been our love to help us, and we should have been happy enough.  They talk about thriftiness, and it just means that poor people are expected to practise a self-denial that the rich can’t even imagine, much less carry out You know now why this kind of talk always angers me.’