But the whole thing was unexpectedly disappointing and surrounded by irritating circumstances.  He found himself face to face with a state of affairs such as he had not contemplated.  In England when a man married, certain practical matters could be inquired into and arranged by solicitors, the amount of the prospective bride’s fortune, the allowances and settlements to be made, the position of the bridegroom with regard to pecuniary matters.  To put it simply, a man found out where he stood and what he was to gain.  But, at first to his sardonic entertainment and later to his disgusted annoyance, Sir Nigel gradually discovered that in the matter of marriage, Americans had an ingenuous tendency to believe in the sentimental feelings of the parties concerned.  The general impression seemed to be that a man married purely for love, and that delicacy would make it impossible for him to ask questions as to what his bride’s parents were in a position to hand over to him as a sort of indemnity for the loss of his bachelor freedom.  Anstruthers began to discover this fact before he had been many weeks in New York.  He reached the realisation of its existence by processes of exclusion and inclusion, by hearing casual remarks people let drop, by asking roundabout and careful questions, by leading both men and women to the innocent expounding of certain points of view.  Millionaires, it appeared, did not expect to make allowances to men who married their daughters; young women, it transpired, did not in the least realise that a man should be liberally endowed in payment for assuming the duties of a husband.  If rich fathers made allowances, they made them to their daughters themselves, who disposed of them as they pleased.  In this case, of course, Sir Nigel privately argued with fine acumen, it became the husband’s business to see that what his wife pleased should be what most agreeably coincided with his own views and conveniences.

His most illuminating experience had been the hearing of some men, hard-headed, rich stockbrokers with a vulgar sense of humour, enjoying themselves quite uproariously one night at a club, over a story one of them was relating of an unsatisfactory German son-in-law who had demanded an income.  He was a man of small title, who had married the narrator’s daughter, and after some months spent in his father-in-law’s house, had felt it but proper that his financial position should be put on a practical footing.

“He brought her back after the bridal tour to make us a visit,” said the storyteller, a sharp-featured man with a quaint wry mouth, which seemed to express a perpetual, repressed appreciation of passing events.  “I had nothing to say against that, because we were all glad to see her home and her mother had been missing her.  But weeks passed and months passed and there was no mention made of them going over to settle in the Slosh we’d heard so much of, and in time it came out that the Slosh thing”—­Anstruthers