The dog was not all.

On another day Constance, prying into the least details of the parlour, discovered a box of cigars inside the lid of the harmonium, on the keyboard.  She was so unaccustomed to cigars that at first she did not realize what the object was.  Her father had never smoked, nor drunk intoxicants; nor had Mr. Critchlow.  Nobody had ever smoked in that house, where tobacco had always been regarded as equally licentious with cards, ’the devil’s playthings.’  Certainly Samuel had never smoked in the house, though the sight of the cigar-box reminded Constance of an occasion when her mother had announced an incredulous suspicion that Mr. Povey, fresh from an excursion into the world on a Thursday evening, ‘smelt of smoke.’

She closed the harmonium and kept silence.

That very night, coming suddenly into the parlour, she caught Samuel at the harmonium.  The lid went down with a resonant bang that awoke sympathetic vibrations in every corner of the room.

“What is it?” Constance inquired, jumping.

“Oh, nothing!” replied Mr. Povey, carelessly.  Each was deceiving the other:  Mr. Povey hid his crime, and Constance hid her knowledge of his crime.  False, false!  But this is what marriage is.

And the next day Constance had a visit in the shop from a possible new servant, recommended to her by Mr. Holl, the grocer.

“Will you please step this way?” said Constance, with affable primness, steeped in the novel sense of what it is to be the sole responsible mistress of a vast household.  She preceded the girl to the parlour, and as they passed the open door of Mr. Povey’s cutting-out room, Constance had the clear vision and titillating odour of her husband smoking a cigar.  He was in his shirt-sleeves, calmly cutting out, and Fan (the lady companion), at watch on the bench, yapped at the possible new servant.

“I think I shall try that girl,” said she to Samuel at tea.  She said nothing as to the cigar; nor did he.

On the following evening, after supper, Mr. Povey burst out: 

“I think I’ll have a weed!  You didn’t know I smoked, did you?”

Thus Mr. Povey came out in his true colours as a blood, a blade, and a gay spark.

But dogs and cigars, disconcerting enough in their degree, were to the signboard, when the signboard at last came, as skim milk is to hot brandy.  It was the signboard that, more startlingly than anything else, marked the dawn of a new era in St. Luke’s Square.  Four men spent a day and a half in fixing it; they had ladders, ropes, and pulleys, and two of them dined on the flat lead roof of the projecting shop-windows.  The signboard was thirty-five feet long and two feet in depth; over its centre was a semicircle about three feet in radius; this semicircle bore the legend, judiciously disposed, “S.  Povey.  Late.”  All the sign-board proper was devoted to the words, “John Baines,” in gold letters a foot and a half high, on a green ground.