‘No, no, Frank, I won’t!’

’Well, if you do, Mrs. Beeton goes into the kitchen-fire.  Now remember?’

‘You are sure you don’t envy Mr. Beeton?’

‘I don’t envy a man upon earth.’

‘Then why should I try to be Mrs. Beeton?’

‘Why indeed?’

’O Frank, what a load off my mind!  Those sixteen hundred pages have just lain upon it for months.  Dear old boy! come on!’

And they clattered downstairs for their golf-clubs.

CHAPTER XII—­MR. SAMUEL PEPYS

There were few things which Maude liked so much as a long winter evening when Frank and she dined together, and then sat beside the fire and made good cheer.  It would be an exaggeration to say that she preferred it to a dance, but next to that supreme joy, and higher even than the theatre in her scale of pleasures, were those serene and intimate evenings when they talked at their will, and were silent at their will, within their home brightened by those little jokes and endearments and allusions which make up that inner domestic masonry which is close-tiled for ever to the outsider.  Five or six evenings a week, she with her sewing and Frank with his book, settled down to such enjoyment as men go to the ends of the earth to seek, while it awaits them, if they will but atune their souls to sympathy, beside their own hearthstones.  Now and again their sweet calm would be broken by a ring at the bell, when some friend of Frank’s would come round to pay them an evening visit.  At the sound Maude would say ‘bother,’ and Frank something shorter and stronger, but, as the intruder appeared, they would both break into, ’Well, really now it was good of you to drop in upon us in this homely way.’  Without such hypocrisy, the world would be a hard place to live in.

I may have mentioned somewhere that Frank had a catholic taste in literature.  Upon a shelf in their bedroom—­a relic of his bachelor days—­there stood a small line of his intimate books, the books which filled all the chinks of his life when no new books were forthcoming.  They were all volumes which he had read in his youth, and many times since, until they had become the very tie-beams of his mind.  His tastes were healthy and obvious without being fine.  Macaulay’s Essays, Holmes’ Autocrat, Gibbons’ History, Jefferies’ Story of my Heart, Carlyle’s Life, Pepys’ Diary, and Borrow’s Lavengro were among his inner circle of literary friends.  The sturdy East Anglian, half prize-fighter, half missionary, was a particular favourite of his, and so was the garrulous Secretary of the Navy.  One day it struck him that it would be a pleasant thing to induce his wife to share his enthusiasms, and he suggested that the evenings should be spent in reading selections from these old friends of his.  Maude was delighted.  If he had proposed to read the rig-vedas in the original Sanskrit, Maude would have listened with a smiling face.  It is in such trifles that a woman’s love is more than a man’s.