She sniffed at most of the hats.  But one of them, of green straw, with a large curving green wing on either side of the crown, and a few odd bits of fluffiness here and there, pleased her.  It was Parisian.  She had been to Paris—­once.  An ‘after-season’ sale at a little shop in Torquay would not, perhaps, seem the most likely place in the world to obtain a chic hat; it is, moreover, a notorious fact that really chic hats cannot be got for less than three pounds, and this hat was marked ten shillings.  Nevertheless, hats are most mysterious things.  Their quality of being chic is more often the fruit of chance than of design, particularly in England.  You never know when nor where you may light on a good hat.  Vera considered that she had lighted on one.

‘They’re probably duck’s feathers dyed,’ she said to herself.  ’But it’s a darling of a hat and it will suit me to a T.’

As for the price, when once you have taken the ticket off a hat the secret of its price is gone forever.  Many a hat less smart than this hat has been marked in Bond Street at ten guineas instead of ten shillings.  Hats are like oil-paintings—­they are worth what people will give for them.

So Vera approached her husband, and said, with an enchanting, innocent smile—­

‘Lend me half-a-sovereign, will you, doggie?’

She called him doggie in those days because he was a sort of dog-man, a sort of St Bernard, shaggy and big, with faithful eyes; and he enjoyed being called doggie.

But on this occasion he was not to be bewitched by the enchanting innocence of the smile nor by the endearing epithet.  He refused to relax his features.

‘You aren’t going to buy another hat, are you?’ he asked sternly, challengingly.

The smile disappeared from her face, and she pulled her slim young self together.

‘Yes,’ she replied harshly.

The battle was definitely engaged.  You may inquire why a man financially capable of hiring a 20-24 h.p.  Napier car, with a French chauffeur named Felix, for a week or more, should grudge his wife ten shillings for a hat.  Well, you are to comprehend that it was not a question of ten shillings, it was a question of principle.  Vera already had eighteen hats, and it had been clearly understood between them that no more money should be spent on attire for quite a long time.  Vera was entirely in the wrong.  She knew it, and he knew it.  But she wanted just that hat.

And they were on their honeymoon, you know:  which enormously intensified the poignancy of the drama.  They had been married only six days; in three days more they were to return to the Five Towns, where Stephen was solidly established as an earthenware manufacturer.  You who have been through them are aware what ticklish things honeymoons are, and how much depends on the tactfulness of the more tactful of the two parties.  Stephen, thirteen years older than Vera, was the more tactful of the two parties.