PART ONE (continued 4)

“I want a silk scarf, please.”

“Yes, madam. Any particular colour?”

“A soft yellow.”

Scarves were brought, and Miss Hornblower betrayed all the faults of the bad saleswoman. She was casual, superior, ready with a vague sneer if a purchaser asked for something that was less expensive. She was Venus caged behind a counter, bored, absorbed in the cult of her own comeliness.

“Madame should never wear yellow.”

Bertha Cragg flushed and let the impertinence pass.

“How much is this one?”

“Nineteen and sevenpence halfpenny.”

“Have you anything cheaper?”

Millie stared at the plain girl.

“Oh, yes, madam, we have a cheap line for customers who don’t want the best article, but the colours are not so naice.”

“Will you show me some, please?”

Miss Hornblower’s languor was extreme. She went in search of the “cheaper line,” chattered for a half a minute to another assistant, gave the glad eye to a shopwalker, and then returned to her customer. Bertha had been watching the girl, and watching her with a jealous intentness, and her imagination saw Tod lying in the lap of this glowingly selfish and red sexed thing, this little haberdashery Delilah whose soul was a box of sweets and a sealskin coat. Bertha Cragg was too subtle a woman to be deceived. The scent was so pronounced, the colour so vivid. This was no case of a pretty, wholesome, commonplace girl transfigured and become an angel in the eyes of a boy, a little romance that makes the world a little cleaner and less mercenary, a romance that ends in a beautiful comradeship and children. There was a glint of green in the goddess’s eyes, and that soft red mouth could scream and utter soul-killing blasphemies. The plain woman saw it all so clearly.

Yet she was quite helpless, and she knew it. A sensitive girl cannot go and tell a man that he is in love with a trashy woman, especially if she happens to be in love with him herself. It was possible that Tod might save himself. The affair might prove to be a mere incident, one of those chapters in a young man’s life that is written in a summer night and soon forgotten. Tod was so clean and wholesome, and, in spite of his innocence, so shrewd, that she saw him tiring of this passion in a petticoat and rushing off to wash himself in the sea. This was a girl who held a man for a day, a month or a year, and Tod was a man who would want to be held for life.

Someone else in Horrox’s shop was interested in Tod’s love affair. Horrox’s junior employees lived in. The girls slept over the main shop, the men over a sort of annexe across an alley; they met for meals in the big dining room under the furniture department. Horrox’s had its etiquette and its autocrats. The autocracy of Miss Harbord, the housekeeper, dominated all the lesser tyrannies. She was a big woman with a swollen, waxy face, a black moustache and a merciless and moral eye; and Horrox’s—with some irony—had nicknamed her “Mother.” Her duties were that of a Watch Committee, of a supervisor of morals. There had been scandals in Horrox’s, and one of the partners, who subsidised Missionary Societies and loved the Memorial Hall, had fallen into such a pious and quite honest rage over it that Miss Harbord had been imported to act as mother superior. Miss Harbord saw to it that the sex adventure was not cultivated in the establishment. She was fearless and devilishly sly, yet no unkind friend to girls and men who did not try to fool her. Miss Harbord was at her best when someone was ill.

Miss Harbord and Millicent Hornblower did not appreciate each other. There had been a breeze, and something more than a breeze.

“If this happens again, Miss Hornblower, I’ll report you.”

“It wasn’t my fault. Why don’t you speak to the man? It’s always the girl who gets the blame.”

“She needn’t do, my dear. And the man hasn’t got off without hearing about it.”

This breeze had blown over months ago, but it had been so blusterous and menacing that the man in question had given up walking recklessly round exposed corners, and he was no longer the lover of Millie Hornblower. Another storm had blown them apart. But he was not the utter cad that Miss Harbord thought him; he was just the warm-blooded, reckless sort of being who took what he could from a woman who chose to give it, but the sort of man who would have given a wounded pal the last drop of water in a desert. A man will be straight and generous with men and crooked with women. You can’t trust him in the sweetshop, but in the street he will get knocked over stopping a runaway horse.

“Say!”

It was rather dark at the head of the stairs leading down to the dining room.

“I told you not to speak to me.”

“That’s true,” said Bob Twine, “but it’s got to be. I’ll meet you down beyond the White Cliff at nine.”

“I shan’t go.”

“Yes you will. It’s about young Tod.”

She went.

Sitting on the shingle under the shelter of an old black fishing boat, they fought each other with words while the dusk came down.

“What are you doing playing with young Tod?” asked the man.

“I’m not playing with him. Besides, it’s no business of yours.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“You’re jealous, I suppose?”

Bob Twine kept throwing stones at an old tin that the sea had left on the shingle. He was dour and menacing, but curiously cool.

“Nothing of the kind. I don’t care a snap of the fingers for you now, and you know it.”

“Thank you.”

“Look here”—and he turned to her with a kind of pleading solemnity—“I taught that kid to swim just here. I taught him to box. He’s a good kid, one of the best. You let him alone.”

The girl looked at him haughtily. “What d’you mean?”

“Don’t put on airs; you know what I mean. You are not the girl for that kid. He’s not like me, the sort of chap that knocks about the seafront——”

“How dare you!” she said.

“Don’t put on airs. I know you a bit too well, old girl. You let Tod alone, or I shall tell him.”

“Tell him?”

“Yes.”

“You cad!”

And then she burst into tears and sat leaning against the boat’s black timbers, while Bob Twine threw stones at the tin and never hit it.

“What beasts men are! You—you made a—a fool of me, you—you know you did. I had to find out what—what a cad you were, and now, when I’ve met a naice boy, you want to drag me down in the—the mud.”

“Bosh!” said the man, affected in spite of himself.

“Yes, you do. It’s mean and beastly. He’s not like you; he’s a little gentleman.”

Bob Twine leant over and grabbed savagely at her wrist.

“Look here, I know all that; but I’m not going to let you play with that kid.”

“I’m not playing with him.”

“Sure?”

“I’m—I’m in love with him. I want him to marry me.”

Bob Twine twisted away from her, and sat with his knees drawn up, staring at the sea. She was drying her eyes and smothering an occasional sob, and waiting watchfully upon his silence. The man’s face looked swarthy and dark and troubled.

“Yes, and what sort of wife will you make him?” he said at last.

“I’m in love with him,” she repeated, “and I know he’s in love with me.”

Twine picked up a handful of shingle and sent the stones scattering savagely over the beach.

“Damn! Suppose I’m a silly fool! But, look here, if I ever catch you running crooked——”

“Thank you,” she said haughtily, “you taught me the difference between a cad and a gentleman.”

But Millie Hornblower was in a panic mood, and she was afraid of this swashbuckler of a man with his swarthy passions and his moments of generous rage. It was possible that he might change his mind, tell Tod that most disastrous tale, and the stars would fall out of the sky of her new romance. She wanted Tod. She was very much in love with him, and the indiscipline of her love was growing greater than her shyness. She had got to slip into Tod’s arms before Bob Twine or any other man could interfere.

She met him next evening at the St. Margarets’ end of the Parade, a rather anxious Tod who had watched for her in vain the night before.

“I missed you last night.”

He was concerned, tender, just a little shy.

“I wasn’t very well,” she said; “something happened, and I stayed in.”

It struck him that she looked strange and unhappy, and his heart was out to discover the reason.

“I’m sorry. Perhaps you don’t care to walk far?”

“It’s not that. I’d like a walk; I’d like to get away from all these people.”

“What about Summer Valley? The wild roses are out in the hedges.”

“Yes, let’s go there,” she said.

But she was not herself. She did not talk much, and was quiet and strange and unsmiling, and now and again she would give Tod a shrinking, yet half-appealing look. Something had happened, and in the Summer Valley Tod watched her face and the sunset. It was very sweet and still there, the wild roses white in the hedges, the long grass full of dim light, the woods on the ground growing black against the yellow sky. A June evening, soft, mysterious and fragrant, a lover’s evening, subtle and strange and sad.

“I wish you would tell me,” said Tod.

“Tell you what, Tod dear?”

He groped shyly for her hand.

“What’s worrying you. You know I——”

She looked frightened, piteous.

“I—I can’t. It’s all so horrid. It has made me feel so cheap and beastly, and not fit to talk to a naice man.”

Tod put a sudden arm round her.

“But I’m just the man you have got to tell. Let’s sit down here under this may tree.”

She let him have his way, and, unpinning her hat, she sat and pulled bits of grass to pieces, while Tod worshipped and waited for her to trust in him.

“Tell me, dear.”

“It’s all that horrid shop life. A pretty girl gets persecuted in a shop.”

“Some man has been saying beastly things to you,” flamed Tod.

She turned her head away.

“Yes.”

“Just tell me his name.”

“I can’t, Tod. It’s better that I shouldn’t.”

“I’ll kill him.”

“Oh, don’t! I don’t want it spread about that I’m the sort of girl men say vile things to. Besides, I gave him his answer, the best answer a girl could give.”

Tod was bending towards her, his young face stern yet glowing.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I was—oh, I can’t! I can’t tell you what I told him.”

“Yes you can, because I love you, dear; I’ve loved you for weeks and weeks.”

She gave him one quick look, and then hung her head.

“Oh, Tod, I told him——”

“Well?”

“That I was in love with a dear, naice boy, and that I didn’t want a cad to make love to me.”

“Millie, is it me you love?”

“Tod, dear Tod, perhaps.”

His arms went round her, and her arms folded about his neck. They clung close and kissed, looked in each other’s eyes, and kissed again.

“You’ll marry me?” said Tod, with his eyes alight and his heart beating fast and hard.

“Yes, dear.”

“Then we’re engaged. You are coming out of that shop.”

Chapter Eighteen

So Tod and Millicent Hornblower became engaged, and Tod bought a diamond and ruby ring at Gildersleeve’s in King William Street. It was a very handsome ring, and it absorbed all the money that he had saved for a summer holiday; but since Shaston had become a place of delicious enchantment Tod thought no more of holidays.

He had become absurdly and delightfully old of a sudden, a little, solemn John Bull carrying new and pleasant responsibilities. Life had undreamt-of problems and interests, and finance ceased to be a matter of no importance. Tod took a survey of his finances, and he began to wonder how much he would be worth to Mr. Rathbone Cragg at the end of another year. In a month or two he would be the master of a thousand pounds—those two mortgages that Uncle Remus had guarded so tenaciously.

“I’ve got to see about it,” said Tod.

He went solemnly into Mr. Rathbone Cragg’s inner room, and announced his engagement.

“Thought I ought to tell you, sir. You have been very kind to me.”

Mr. Cragg looked embarrassed.

“Quite so, Western. And who is——”

“Her name is Miss Hornblower. She is one of the ladies in Horrox’s. I knew her when I was a boy.”

“An old romance,” said Mr. Cragg, smiling as though he had a pain, and wondering what Mr. Burgetrode would say about it. “And how old is the lady, Western?”

“About my age, sir. I’m just on twenty-one. And I wanted to ask you about the future.”

“Quite so, Western. Prospects, eh?”

“I have new responsibilities, sir.”

“Let me see, you are getting twenty-one shillings a week?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Rathbone Cragg found himself in a subtle situation. Mr. Julian Burgetrode was the man who mattered, and Mr. Burgetrode was the god behind the gods. He was not on the stage, and Mr. Cragg had no right to call upon him, or to betray to Tod how much depended upon the great man’s pleasure. Therefore he temporised, and decided to write a letter.

“I should like to consider your future, Western, if you will give me a day or two.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I have nothing but praise for your work here.”

Mr. Cragg wrote to Mr. Julian Burgetrode and explained the situation. When he went home to lunch he told his wife much that he had said to Mr. Burgetrode, but he said it in a different and more domesticated way.

“That young fool has got engaged to a shop-girl. Of course it’s no business of mine, but with his prospects it’s a disaster.”

“And B. was so fond of him,” said the wife resentfully; “you know that, Edward?”

“She had better forget all about it—at once.”

“She has. I shan’t have the boy up here again.”

“Don’t be hasty, my dear; it never pays to be hasty.”

Mr. Julian Burgetrode replied by return to Mr. Cragg’s letter.

“Please carry on in exactly the same way,” he wrote, “and consider the boy as your clerk and nothing else. Offer him his market value. I shall be in Shaston very shortly.”

Mr. Cragg carried out these instructions, and his “market value” was a shock to Tod. It suggested an addition of five shillings to his weekly wage at the end of the present year, an income of sixty-seven pounds twelve shillings.

Tod began to consider economies. The moment had arrived when he found time to dawdle in front of furniture shops, and to understand Arthur Mossup’s preoccupation over the quest of a house. He decided that he would buy no more new clothes, that he was eating too much, and that his room at Miss Truebody’s was needlessly expensive.

Meanwhile Miss Millicent Hornblower was very much engaged, and enjoying the sensation. Nearly everybody in the establishment of Messrs. Horrox & Horrox became aware of that ruby and diamond ring, and it was flashed in the eyes of lady customers who made boring demands for reels of cotton and hanks of silk. It was shown to Miss Harbord, and that grim woman’s congratulations were characteristically frank.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened to you, my dear. And a bit of plain gold will be worth more than all those pretty stones.”

Millie warned her friends and gossips that her sojourn would be short in the house of Horrox and Horrox.

“He’s such a dear boy, and hates the idea of my being in a shop. He thinks it isn’t naice. Yet, he’s got money, you know. I don’t see him staying with the Craggs. Someone’s interested in him, a gentleman who is supposed to be a millionaire.”

Her gossips listened, and agreed that Millie was becoming a snob.

As for economy, it was not part of the landscape. She had spacious ideas and a brilliant sense of chiaroscuro, and little sumptuous ambitions as to houses and clothes. Tod was going up in the world. He had capital and influence, and Millie did not see herself making beds and sweeping floors or washing up dishes in some little back kitchen. She was going to be a lady and give tea parties, walk into Horrox and Horrox’s and issue orders across the counter, and take her morning cup of coffee at Judson’s café. Tod was a dear boy. She was sure that he would make a lovely husband.

Various people congratulated Tod. He met Bob Twine one Wednesday afternoon, and the swarthy man lounged in front of Tod and offered him sheepish and glum felicitations.

“Fancy a kid like you getting married! Suppose you’re as pleased as Punch?”

“She’s such a dear girl,” said Tod; “we are going to be very happy.”

Twine looked at him queerly and seemed to be struggling with some inward pain.

“A long time yet, I suppose?”

“I want to get married this year.”

“Oh, cheese it! What’s the hurry?”

“I don’t like Millie being in a shop.”

Twine went for a long prowl, the savage prowl of a man who was at war with the world.

“Damn! I ought to tell the kid, but somehow I can’t. Perhaps she’ll run straight with him. God knows!”

Someone came out of Miss Truebody’s sitting-room one evening as Tod was running down the stairs, and stood in the dusk-filled passage waiting. It was Bertha Cragg.

“I want to congratulate you, Tod,” she said; “I’m so glad.”

Her voice was very steady and quiet, but she did not look at him, and her eyes were set between bitterness and tears. Tod took her good wishes as he would have taken an “Oh, well played!” at tennis. He was quite unsubtle towards Bertha Cragg, and he never knew that he had lost the greatest thing in the world.

“I’m awfully happy,” he told her ingenuously.

“I hope you will always be happy, Tod. I should like to have met your fiancée, but I am going away.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. An aunt of mine is going abroad for a year, and she has asked me to go with her.”

“I hope you’ll have a jolly time,” said Tod; “you deserve it.”

And Bertha Cragg passed out of his life.

Tod made several pilgrimages to Arthur Mossup’s green and white cottage in the Old Town, and sat at the feet of those authorities on domestic science. Mossup was rather worried about the little shop; business was not as brisk as it might be, but he forgot all his worries in prompting Tod. He had a great love of detail, kept most elaborate accounts, and was ready to tell Tod the cost of anything, from a second-hand mangle to a stair-rod.

“It’s all here, Western, every tintack in the house. Nothing like knowing where sixpence goes. Olive can tell you all about the food.”

“How many tons of coal do you burn a year?” asked Tod.

“Here you are—five tons, three hundredweight. And you get a Peerless oil-stove. Saves pounds. Ask Olive.”

Olive, a pleasant, dark little woman, agreed.

Tod made a note of the Peerless oil-stove. He made notes of everything that Mossup told him. Never did a man have a more earnest and attentive disciple.

“Bring your fiancée up here, old man; she and Olive can have a talk. My wife’s a marvel, Western; there never was such a woman; I’m the luckiest man that ever was. She does the hats and the house, and she’s prettier to look at than ever she was.”

“I think she’s very happy,” said Tod.

Mossup blinked his short-sighted blue eyes.

“Do you, Western? I’m glad. I’m such a quiet sort of chap, and do you know, I never thought she’d marry me. Amazing, wasn’t it?”

“You’re a brick, old man. May I bring Millicent up on Sunday?”

“Come up to tea; we have tea in the garden on Sundays. Come up about four o’clock.”

But Miss Hornblower was not interested in the Mossups or in their way of doing things. Tod took her down to tea, with ingenuous praise of Olive and her cleverness, but Millie did not sit and listen. She led the conversation, and led it to a level above the careful economies of a Mossup’s day, touching upon such luxuries as parlour-maids, late dinner, Turkey carpets, at-home days, and whether you should have a double bed in your spare bedroom. She depressed the Mossups and impressed Tod. Millicent had ideas; she knew how things ought to be done in a successful household, and Tod felt challenged by her optimism.

She referred to the Mossups’ cottage as a “stuffy little place,” and in such a horrid neighbourhood, too.

“And did you see her poor hands?”

“What was the matter with them?” Tod asked.

“They don’t keep a servant!”

To judge by her tone there was something mysteriously shocking in such social degradation.

“Perhaps they can’t afford it.”

“Fancy a man letting his wife slave like that. I think it’s disgraceful.”

And Tod—the lover—was too much in love to disagree.

Mr. Julian Burgetrode arrived in Shaston towards the end of the same week. He did not come by train, but in a car which he drove himself, a great grey car that slid along noiselessly, but could say “perr-rump” if challenged, and go streaking up a hill like a huge grey lizard up a wall. This car swung into Caroline Crescent and stopped in front of the Craggs’ office. Mr. Burgetrode sent in a message by his chauffeur, and Tod came out.

“Get in,” said Mr. Burgetrode, “in here.”

Tod got in.

“Shall I want a coat, sir?”

“No. I don’t need you, Griggs. Get back to the hotel.”

“Right, sir!”

Mr. Burgetrode swung the car into Church Road, went up the steep hill at thirty miles an hour, squeezed through between a tram and a railway van, scraped past a fool of a wagon that was crawling all over the road, cut round Post Corner, and drove a group of loafers hurriedly on to the pavement. Going up the steep hill from Post Corner to the Ridge they overtook another car that was piqued at being hooted at and tried to show its pace. Mr. Burgetrode’s car went by it with a rude snort from the exhaust, crowded in front, and smothered its defeated rival with dust.

Tod had spent a rather breathless five minutes. They had seemed on the edge of hitting things, but had never quite hit them, and Mr. Burgetrode sat there as imperturbable as sin, looking straight ahead and not bothering about anything. He had not spoken a word, and he ignored Tod until they were on the straight and swinging road that lept through the woods along the ridge towards Bidhurst.

“What do you think of that bit of driving, young Ajax?”

“You made things move, sir,” said Tod.

“Beastliness, sheer beastliness. But Power can be beastly.”

“People have to get out of the way?”

“The sleepy fools. Power, young man, Power’s like this car; it can glide along and leave everything behind, and so softly that the sleepy fools hardly feel the power. Or it can drive them into the ditch, kick dust in their faces. It depends how you use it. But—Power!”

Tod felt those blue eyes on him, and he was puzzled.

“Rather fine—to have Power, sir.”

“What for?”

“To keep bullies from bullying; to put wrong things right.”

“That’s the ideal, is it?”

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Tod.

“Nothing, so long as you keep fierce and fit. No sentimental slosh, mind you. And don’t let any woman cut your hair.”

Tod gave a quick glance at Mr. Burgetrode.

“Like Samson?” he asked.

“Exactly.”

Tod cogitated.

“You mean—any woman?”

“There is only one woman in a thousand fit to be a comrade and use Power. They make props and prigs; get round a man like ivy. So you’re engaged?”

“Yes, sir,” said Tod.

“Young fool!” reflected Mr. Burgetrode.

Then he smiled at Tod.

“Dreams, eh? I had ’em myself, but the only one that was worth while died. I married Power after that, Tod, and I have been married to her ever since. You will come and dine with me to-morrow night?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“With your fiancée. Horrible word! Seven-thirty at the Majestic. Give the lady my compliments and say I shall be charmed and honoured to meet her. What’s her name?”

“Millicent Hornblower,” said Tod.

“A good self-advertising name! Don’t be a young fool and think yourself offended. Only the little people strut on dunghills.”

Mr. Burgetrode turned the car at the Bidhurst crossroads and drove back to Shaston with extraordinary mildness.

There is no more blind and obstinate creature than a young man in love, and Tod did not foresee the coming crisis in his career. He failed to appreciate Mr. Burgetrode’s power or his point of view, and his infatuation was so serene and utter that it did not occur to him that Mr. Burgetrode might not like Miss Millicent Hornblower. The possibility of it never entered Tod’s head. He was so much in love with Millie.

It was a rather excited and confident Tod who met her that evening on the Parade.

“Mr. Burgetrode’s here. I’ve been out in his car.”

The girl’s eyes were on the alert.

“What’s he want?”

“He asked us to dinner at the Majestic to-morrow evening.”

“Asked me?”

“Why, of course.”

Tod’s dear lady went very pink.

“How naice of him!”

And then she added breathlessly:

“I must get back at once, Tod—at once.”

“What for, dear?”

“My dress. I’ve got a dress, but it wants touching up for the Majestic. You’ll be in your dress-suit.”

“Shall I?” Tod asked. “Mr. Burgetrode doesn’t bother.”

“Of course, we must dress. It would be rude to him if we didn’t.”

“Hang it!” said Tod. “Have I got to wear white gloves?”

“No, you dear silly. A dinner jacket and a black tie. Have you got a dinner jacket?”

“A thing without tails? Yes.”

“And we must have a taxi.”

“I’ll see about the taxi,” said Tod.

Tod called at Horrox’s with his taxi at about twenty minutes past seven, and waited at the side door that was used by the shop assistants. He became aware of three merry and fluffy heads at an open window above, the heads of three irresponsible young women who were interested in life.

“Hallo, Tod!” said one of them.

Tod took off his hat and began to blush, being very conscious of his white shirt front and black tie.

“Doesn’t he look sweet!”

“Hallo, here’s Majestic Millie!”

Miss Hornblower appeared, wearing a black velvet cloak, and a length of white filmy stuff over her head. Her shoes were of yellow satin, and Tod had a glimpse of a yellow silk stocking. The three young ladies at the window sent up a cheer, but Miss Hornblower’s dignity refused to be disturbed. Tod opened the door of the taxi for her, and they drove off.

“Teases, those girls,” he said.

“They are jealous, that’s all.”

Tod thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than the girl at his side, and most certainly she was very lovely. She let her black cloak float open, and showed a gleam of white shoulders and arms shining out from a mass of black lace. She had pinned a yellow rose over her bosom, a little point of glowing colour between her shiny hair and her yellow shoes. Tod contemplated the complete and utter conquest of Mr. Burgetrode, an immediate surrender to this most charming and seductive young woman. It was fate.

“Do I look naice?”

“Lovely,” said Tod; “just perfect.”

She patted his knee and, looking critically at his tie, told herself that Tod Western was quite a gentlemanly youngster. His dinner jacket fitted him well, and his head looked sleek and wet.

“It’s rather jolly, isn’t it?” she said.

“What?”

“Being engaged. I hope your Mr. Burgetrode will like me.”

“Could he help it?” quoth the lover.

Mr. Julian Burgetrode was sitting in the white loggia of the Hotel Majestic, sinfully comfortable in an old Norfolk jacket and a pair of grey flannel trousers. He saw the taxi drive up, and Tod giving his gallant hand to a very handsome, golden-haired young woman in black. And Mr. Burgetrode was annoyed with himself.

“A lapse on your part, my friend,” he thought; “only a cad makes children feel uncomfortable.”

He went and met them on the steps, the old sahib, suppressing all that was queer and discordant in that masterful soul of his. Tod, looking flushed and happy, presented Miss Millicent Hornblower.

“I really must apologise to you young people,” said the great man; “I was late—too late to change.”

“Please don’t mention it,” said the girl, thinking that Tod’s friend looked very snuffy, and not the sort of figure she had expected.

Mr. Burgetrode gave her a sharp stare of his blue eyes. He saw the whole of her in five seconds—red mouth, satin shoes, golden hair, engagement ring. Here was a hard young pippin with a rosy skin and a deceptive promise of much juice and sweetness. Mr. Burgetrode became very polite.

“Supposing we go in? Smith, take the lady’s cloak, will you? What a pleasant day we have had.”

“Yes, the weather’s quite naice,” said the girl, “specially when you’ve got an autocar. What’s yours, Mr. Burgetrode?”

“My little thing? A Graham Rolt. I like speed, you know.”

He shepherded them into the dining room, and to a far corner where a table had been laid for three. There were roses on the table, red and white roses in a big bowl. The head waiter, treading softly, wished Mr. Burgetrode a “good evening, sir,” pulled back Miss Hornblower’s chair for her, and waited discreetly; with the wine list.

“Veuve Cliquot,” said Mr. Burgetrode.

He felt that Tod’s young woman was dressed and scented for champagne.

A sudden and unexplainable shyness had fallen upon Tod. He was a little awed by his fiancée’s talkative sangfroid and by the bold way she sat there and attacked Mr. Burgetrode. Tod had expected her to be rather coy and mute, and perhaps—in his heart of hearts—he was just a little disappointed. He knew that Mr. Burgetrode did not like women, but Tod had never been able to discover what sort of women the great man did like. Perhaps the shy, gentle, rather silent type? And Tod had an uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Burgetrode was being extraordinarily polite, that he would have been much less polite and much more the Mr. Burgetrode as Tod knew him, if Millie had seemed a little frightened and in need of help. But she was a young woman armed, out to attack, her head full of the impression she intended to make, unable to forget that the great man had thought of her as a “shop-girl,” that it was her business to show him that she was no fool. Her blue eyes looked hard and alert, and she was very careful in the ordering of her hands. Yet Tod had a horrid feeling that Mr. Burgetrode was not pleased.

“Quite a crowd here to-night,” she observed, staring round the room.

“Quite—a number—of people,” echoed Mr. Burgetrode. “Shaston is getting—fashionable.”

“It’s very dowdy this year, don’t you think?”

“Is it?”

“One doesn’t see such naice people; so trippery, you know. We have got quite a naice band this year, but it’s quite spoilt by all the common girls and knuts. I’m so glad Tod isn’t a knut.”

“No, it’s a great blessing; I’m glad you realise that, Miss Hornblower. Though I have seen him in mauve socks.”

“Oh, Tod!” said his fiancée.

Tod blushed.

“I like old clothes,” he began; “my dad always looked shabby.”

“Some men can afford to look shabby,” said the girl.

Mr. Burgetrode smiled.

“Two points of view,” he remarked meaningly; “and what sort of music do you like?”

“I can’t bear ragtime.”

“No?”

“Mendelssohn is quite naice, don’t you think?”

“Well, Tod, what do you say?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Tod, “but I like marches, and music that makes you feel all funny inside.”

“Stick to that,” quoth the great man. “Don’t try and train yourself to look in a mirror.”

Tod was glad when the dinner came to an end, and they went and sat outside in the loggia and drank coffee. Mr. Burgetrode sent for Millicent’s cloak, and offered Tod a cigarette. They watched the people walking up and down the Parade, and Tod tried to feel that he belonged to the Majestic, and that he had no fear of the hall porter. He wished Millie would not talk quite so much, and all about things of which she knew nothing. Mr. Burgetrode had lit a pipe. He was bored.

Tod had ordered the taxi at half-past nine. It was five minutes late, and Tod had begun to fidget. Millie was talking politics to Mr. Burgetrode—politics! It appeared that she was interested in the Primrose League, that society cherished by old ladies in memory of a brilliant and cynical Jew.

Tod got up.

“Here’s our taxi.”

Millie gathered herself, and did the “so charmed to have met you” to Mr. Burgetrode. He glanced at Tod.

“I want to see you to-morrow, Western.”

“What time, sir?”

“Here, after dinner.”

Tod handed the amateur gentlewoman into the taxi, and had a glimpse of Mr. Burgetrode knocking out his pipe irritably against one of the white pillars. Mr. Burgetrode went up the steps and into the hotel, and did not turn his head to look back. Tod felt that the great man was not pleased.

“What a queer old stick! I did my best, Tod, didn’t I?”

Her warm hand snuggled into his, and Tod was swept by a gust of sudden tenderness and chivalrous contrition. She had been making a brave show for his sake, playing her best game, against that difficult old man! Darn Mr. Burgetrode! This girl was worth twenty Mr. Burgetrodes.

Tod bent and kissed her hand.

“You were great,” he said. “I’m awfully proud of you, Millie.”

She smiled, for she was rather proud of herself.

Old Burgetrode had carried a chair on to the little balcony outside his bedroom, and was refilling his pipe with the slow hands of a thinker. He sat there for half an hour, straddling the chair, his arms crossed on the chair-back, watching the sea. Once or twice he smiled, the smile of a man who saw that the jest of life was against himself, and that his power and his cleverness were as so much sand when the tide of Nature came rolling in. You chose a boy, set him to work, planned all sorts of great happenings for him, and one day some little yellow-haired chit crooked a finger at him, and the boy ran wild, chasing a petticoat.

Mr. Burgetrode laughed.

“You old fool,” he said, “of course it was bound to happen. The child has to pass through its mother’s womb, the man has to pass through the womb of the world. We all start afresh, we all have to learn the same old sorry things, we all make the same mistakes and have to pay for them. Whoever listens, or takes advice from an old man? What chance has Fate when a boy gets a glimpse of a girl’s bosom?”

Yet the inevitableness did not reconcile him to the particular fate that had overtaken Tod. He had hoped that Tod might escape the sex lure, or escape it until his sinews were set and his head involved in the great adventure, when a woman might not matter. But this little shop-girl was a tragedy. She was pulling Tod into a parlour, fastening him to the grocer’s and to the draper’s bills, making a little middle-class gentleman of him, a thing that lusted to live in a red villa, to grow geraniums in the front garden, and to tottle out on a motor-bike with a side-car on Sundays. She was clever, and she was cheap.

“Damn her!” said Mr. Burgetrode, “damn her—and her red mouth! The succulent young hussy!”

And yet he was sorry for the shop-girl and sorry for Tod. He had a shrewd glimpse of them making all the old sorry mistakes, floundering, quarrelling, filling their lives with little sordid ambitions, envies, pathetic make-believes. That girl was no mate for Tod. When he had grown tired of her body——!

Mr. Burgetrode knocked out his pipe and went to bed.

Tod came to the Hotel Majestic about half-past eight next evening, a square-headed and obstinate-eyed young man, vaguely aware of clouds on the horizon. Mr. Burgetrode was waiting in the lounge. He took Tod up to his sitting-room, made him sit down in the most comfortable chair, offered him his cigarette-case, and lit his own pipe. The great man was unusually reposeful and quiet, almost gentle. Youth does not react to a scolding tongue, nor had Mr. Burgetrode any intention of trying to coerce a thing that is stronger than any man’s philosophy. Tod should go his way, but he should choose the path with his eyes open.

“So you are going to get married, Western?”

“I am, sir,” said Tod.

“Very well; that settles it.”

And then he told Tod all that he had planned for him, all that he thought to make of him. He was more frank than any father to a son, and his frankness was without prejudice or guile.

“That’s how matters were to shape, Western. I wanted you to have two years at Cragg’s just to see how you shaped, and the rest would have followed. I should have put you with an architect for a year, with a firm of builders for two years, and then sent you on a tour through some of the big industries to get an idea of the general scheme of things. After that I should have sent you round the world. And what for? Because you took my fancy—because I thought you had it in you to make a big man of yourself. But I did not want to influence you in any way, tie you to a stick, and warp your growth. As it is, your lady friend has intervened.”

Tod sat there, very stubborn and grave.

“I couldn’t help it, sir. I didn’t know.”

“Boy, it was I who was the idiot to dream dreams for a young man.”

“But are—they—dead, sir?”

Mr. Burgetrode smiled queerly.

“Of course. My young superman was to spread his wings and fly. He had to think of nothing but flying, climbing, getting to the peak, and of getting there alone. A man can’t fly with a woman clinging to his legs—a young woman who doesn’t want him to fly.”

“My fiancée——” Tod began.

“I am saying nothing, Western, against the girl. You are doing the most natural thing in the world, both of you. I did it myself, once. But she wants you to marry her and live in a little red villa, and go to the pier concerts, and keep a cat and buy her a new hat every month. She can’t help it, nor can you.”

“I asked her,” said Tod; “I’m in love with her. I suppose, sir, you’re not interested in me any more?”

Mr. Burgetrode relit his pipe.

“There’s the old saying, that a young man married is a young man marred. In this case, it seems to be applicable. You can’t do all that I had planned for you. You can’t strap a knapsack on your back and go out to conquer the world. A young man who is married has one hand tied behind him, and cowardice trots at his elbow. He’s afraid of the big adventure, the great risks, and that the dragon may devour his wife. It’s his business to kill the dragon for the sake of his wife? Quite so. But it’s so much easier to stay at home in a little house with thousands of little people in thousands of other little houses, and not go out into places where dragons rage. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“So it’s all over?” said Tod, keeping a stiff lip.

“Exactly. You have to make your choice between a girl and a career, and knowing what you are——”

“I can’t break a promise. I’m not a cad.”

“Boy, that was what I was going to say. You have promised to marry the girl, and I know you will marry her. My young Ajax would marry her, if it meant hunting for cabbage-stalks in dust-bins. There is nothing more to be said. You have to live your life and to learn. No soldier is worth his pay who hasn’t seen his own blood. I should like you to write to me now and again.”

Tod got up, but his knees felt shaky.

“Am I to stay on with the Craggs, sir?”

“Of course. It’s a career, of sorts. I shall write to Mr. Cragg, and arrange that for you. If ever you are a free man again, Western, you can come to me.”

“Thank you, sir. I think I’ll be going now.”

“Good night. Don’t forget that most men and women cheat in the great game.”

“I’ll never cheat, sir.”

“Give them a straight drive on the jaw, and good luck to you. Good-bye!”

Tod went down the great staircase of the Majestic, a very sober and rather sorrowful Tod. He did not guess then that three years would pass before he would see Mr. Julian Burgetrode again.

But he did not tell Millie that he had lost his great patron. He did not think that it would be fair to tell her.

Mr. Burgetrode was walking up and down his bedroom.

“Damn!” he said, “the boy has grit. I knew it was hopeless. If that girl only had a nose like Cyrano de Bergerac’s! Faces, faces, always faces! A fine man sucked dry by a pair of red lips! Good lord, I think I’ll adopt a eunuch!”

Chapter Nineteen

A change had come over Tod’s career. He had ceased to be one of the young gods of the world with the light of the morning shining in his face. He became a serious and contriving Tod, a young man whose thoughts were in shop windows and furniture catalogues, who refused to buy himself new ties, and who was very careful of the pennies in his pockets.

“I’ve got responsibilities,” he explained to Mr. Lavender; “no more Turkish cigarettes, you know.”

Mr. Lavender, being an old bachelor, was a romanticist.

“Giving up is gaining,” he told Tod, “and yet nature is a spendthrift. I always did believe in young people marrying in May, a bit of spring recklessness.”

Tod was not feeling reckless. Every page of his day-book carried those uncompromising figures—“£67 12s. a year.” The immediate and unfailing retort of his youth was “Yes, and the mortgages make another forty. We shall have to manage on a hundred or so to start with.” He was making grim efforts to save money out of his weekly pay, money that was necessary for the equipping of a little house, but Millie was so alive and so gay, so fond of chocolates and sweet cakes and the best seats in the Pier Pavilion! Tod had never forgotten the incident of that German-silver ring. Besides, he had a lover’s pride and the generous man’s hatred of miserliness. He was engaged to marry the prettiest girl in Shaston, and if she liked chocolates and fine clothes—well, there was some excuse for it, and even Tod’s shrewdness could not kill the love of a fine and swaggering gesture.

“Two stalls, please,” or “A pound of the best in the shop.”

Before many weeks had passed Tod realised that Millicent had ambitions. Her social ideas were not to be expressed by an income of one hundred pounds a year.

“I want a suite like that for the drawing-room.”

They were standing in front of a furniture shop window and looking at a mahogany suite, whose chairs were upholstered in pink brocade. Tod was heard to say something about the price.

“Oh, your Mr. Burgetrode will help.”

That was her answer to everything, and Tod began to grow rather weary of Mr. Burgetrode’s empty name. There were times when he wished that he had told Millie that the great man had cast them off, and that he—Tod—had had to choose between a girl and a career, but he shirked making the confession. He did not like the idea of presenting himself as a martyr, and perhaps his pride was piqued. Confound Mr. Burgetrode! He could manage his own adventure without being haunted by that old man of the sea.

“I couldn’t expect him to do that, you know.”

“Why not?”

“I want to be independent,” said Tod.

Houses inspired the same social dream. They used to walk about Shaston in the long summer evenings, and look at houses, but not the sort of houses Tod had seen himself inhabiting. Millie had a particular affection for a little red villa called “Carnarvon” in Guildford Lane, a villa with casement windows and a sort of little pepper-pot of a turret stuck on at one corner, and gables that were filled with imitation oak. There were two little lawns in front, with beds of geranium and calceolaria, and six standard roses on each side of the gravel path.

“Isn’t it sweet?”

“It’s bigger than we should want, dear.”

“Oh, Tod, we don’t want a shabby, poky little place.”

Tod squeezed her arm.

“Nothing’s too good for you.”

She had begun to debauch him.

He showed a new touchiness and the faint suspicion of a swagger in the office of Rathbone Cragg & Son, for it was evident to Tod that the favour of the gods had changed. Old Cragg showed him a new curtness, a peremptoriness that made Tod know himself to be an underling. Frederick Cragg had long refrained from cultivating Mr. Julian Burgetrode’s protégé, and his attitude towards Tod was one of casual and superior indifference. Tod had lapsed. And Tod did not feel humble; he resented the subtle insult to his personal pride. They had been obliging Mr. Burgetrode, had they? Some day he would show them a thing or two. The woman was teaching him to strut and to crow.

In August Tod became one-and-twenty, and the hands of Uncle Remus became impotent and obsolete. Tod went over to see his uncle, and spent a night at Burnt Farm. Uncle Remus talked a good deal about Tod’s “little bit o’ property,” what an asset it was, and how a wise man never gambled with his capital. “Suppose you’ll be leaving the money where it is?”

“At present,” said Tod, “but I’m going to be married. I may want a little of it for furnishing.”

Uncle Remus sat up stiff and straight in his chair.

“You’re goin’ to be married?”

“Yes.”

“And only just turned twenty-one.”

“Why shouldn’t I get married?” Tod asked.

“Who’s the girl?”

“A young lady in Shaston. She was in Horrox’s shop.”

“A shop-girl?”

“Yes.”

A cunning look came over Uncle Remus’s thin face. He leant forward, and pointed the stem of his pipe at Tod.

“She ain’t drivin’ you, is she?”

“What do you mean?”

“You ain’t got her into trouble?”

Tod lost his temper, and said angry things to Uncle Remus, but Uncle Remus was quite unmoved.

“ ’Tain’t no use losing your temper,” he said; “pity is it ain’t as I hinted. Five bob a week’s cheaper than a wife. I ain’t no believer in gels.”

“What about my mother?”

“Your mother was a pedigree,” said Uncle Remus; “you’ll never find a gel like her.”

The heavens looked like falling when Tod made his fiancée realise the truth, that they would have to live on about a hundred pounds a year. She wept, and Tod behaved like a guilty fool.

“I don’t want to stay in a shop, Tod; they are all so horrid to me.”

“But you are not going to stay at Horrox’s, my darling; we are going to get married quite soon.”

“I—I couldn’t ask you to keep me when you have only a hundred a year. And I do want you, Tod—I want you awful bad at times.”

They were lying in the bracken of one of the little woods in Summer Valley, and Tod took the girl in his arms.

“I want you—too.”

They kissed, and Millie pulled Tod over to her and lay with him very close.

“Oh, I want to be married! Why can’t you get that old Mr. Burgetrode to help us?”

“Because I can’t,” said Tod, obstinate even in her arms; “he expects me to be independent, and not to cadge. We have got to manage somehow.”

“Perhaps he’s only waiting to see how we get on?”

“Perhaps.”

“Putting us on our trial.”

“Perhaps.”

“Oh, Tod, why can’t you have a business of your own?”

“Well, why not? What sort of business?”

“Let’s think. You have some capital. Lots of chaps have succeeded with half your money and half your brains.”

“It’s an idea,” said Tod, sitting up rather flushed and excited. “Why shouldn’t we do something on our own?”

Eve had suggested the adventure, and it was Eve who discovered the inevitable inspiration. Tod lay awake half the night, thinking of all the possible ways of making money, and of how he could apply that £1,000 of his so that it should give him a share of gold pieces to pour into the lap of his beloved. Tod’s experience was very limited, but imagination rushed in where his experience failed him. Farming? No, he could not imagine Millicent living on a farm. A shop? But what sort of shop? And his bile rose at the thought of a life behind the counter. He might become an agent for something—what he could not quite say. He had heard of men making quite a lot of money by starting a big boarding-house or a small hotel, but he did not think that Millie would approve of the idea. He knew a good deal about houses, and a little about the building of houses, and he wondered whether any of the Shaston builders would be willing to take an enterprising partner? There were so many possibilities, but they were so vague and nebulous that Tod continued to grope and to grasp nothing.

“I’m going to take you for a walk,” said Millie.

“Looking at houses?”

“No; just a walk.”

It was a Wednesday afternoon, a hot and sweltering day in the thick of the Shaston holiday season. The town was full of young women in white dresses, young women with red arms and necks, and sun patterns scorched on their chests, and wearing white stockings that looked tired and overworked. Youths lounged about in badly washed flannel trousers, hatless, working up a manly tan. Perspiring people from London, fat women with shiny faces, bored men in Sunday clothes carrying buckets and spades, swarms of children, all looking for the joy of life that was pappy and soft as a stale cucumber. Hawkers pushing barrows of fruit. Dirty women with very white aprons selling shrimps. Motors and human things that smelt. All the tawdriness and trash and pathos of a “holiday resort” in August.

Miss Hornblower led her lover towards the railway station.

“What’s the idea?” he asked her.

“Nothing. Just watching the crowds.”

She looked very cool and comely in a white dress flecked with touches of cerise. Tod compared her with all these overheated, sun-scorched, unstarched women, and his pride in her challenged the spirit of adventure. How could a man fail to succeed with such a charming young woman to fight for? His love was yearning to take the world by the throat and compel it to surrender happiness and riches.

A London train had just poured its crowd into Shaston station, not the cheapest of crowds, but people who travelled by an afternoon train and meant to stay more than a week. A couple of taxis were loading up luggage, and three or four flies had been fought for by pushful fathers of families. There were little piles of luggage and groups of impatient humans dotted about the pavement. Even outside porters had an artificial importance.

“I-want-a-taxi,” a fat man was saying to a porter, a fat man in grey tweeds and a Homburg hat, an emphatic man, a swollenly self-important man. “I tell you-I-want-a-taxi. What’s the matter with this confounded town?”

“There ain’t no taxis, sir; all engaged.”

“I’ve seen two, just two,” said the fat man truculently, “two taxis to meet a London train. It’s a damned scandal!”

Miss Hornblower and Tod overheard the man’s accusation, and his damning of the enterprise of Shaston.

“Seems to feel the heat,” said Tod.

“He’s right. There ought to be more taxis.”

She watched Tod’s face, but her hero had not caught the inspiration.

They wandered back down the town, but there was a purpose in the girl’s pilgrimage. She led Tod down Queen Street to where a certain Pumpelly kept a shop and garage, a rather dingy place that always seemed packed with a chaotic mass of cars, and where irritable amateur drivers wanted to know how they were to get in or how they were to get out.

Six or seven private cars were lined up along the pavement. A very greasy young man in dirty overalls was doing something to one of them. One long, grey touring car was full of very superior gentlewomen who were inciting their man to find out, and find out with vigour, why they were not being attended to. A fat man, rather like the fat man at the railway station, was standing at the garage entrance and making his presence felt.

“Is there anybody in charge here?”

“Try the office, sir,” said a small boy.

The fat man tried the office, and met Mr. Pumpelly in person.

“I have been waiting here for ten minutes.”

“Sorry, sir, no more petrol till this evening.”

“No petrol! I call it a scandal in a town like this. Up north—we know how to do things.”

“You had better get back up north, sir,” said Mr. Pumpelly.

Millicent Hornblower and Tod had more than a glimpse of all this stultified prosperity, and Tod stood on the opposite sidewalk, with his hands in his pocket, and his eyes at gaze. There was a very distinct block in the flow of Mr. Pumpelly’s functions. It was obvious that he wanted more enterprise, more men, more accommodation.

“Do you see it now?” asked the voice of the girl.

Tod turned on her with a flash of his blue eyes.

“Taxis—a garage—of course!”

And then, in that public highway, he pinched Millie’s ear.

“You clever darling; you’ve got a head! Why didn’t I think of it before?”

Chapter Twenty

So Tod plunged.

There was an empty shop in Duke Street, a long tunnel of a shop that had been the home of a local iron-monger who had failed to meet his creditors. The owner of the premises showed himself to be a very adaptable and progressive person. He agreed to spend a hundred pounds on the place, refit it, put in a new front with big glass doors, and knock down part of a back wall so that cars could circulate by way of a backyard and side lane. He added ten pounds to the rent—but Tod was delighted; he did not grudge his landlord his ten per cent.

Western’s Garage was opened on New Year’s Day. The shop front was painted red; and a big blue-and-white sign jutted out on an iron bracket and let everybody know that there was a garage in Duke Street. Tod, under Miss Hornblower’s inspiration, had been very lavish with his gold lettering on the plate-glass windows. Orders were “promptly attended to”—“All trains met”—“Touring cars for hire.” The shop window was full of lamps, horns, tools, an assortment of tyres, jacks, oil cans, and the like. The garage held one taxi and one American touring car, both obtained under a system of deferred payments. The staff consisted of Tod, a driver-mechanic, and a boy.

Tod had learnt to drive a car. He had read all the automobile journals with great diligence, and paid various visits to London and the Midlands. Someone in Wardour Street offered him certain commercial facilities, one of those keen gentlemen who are so clever at making money out of other people’s enterprise and energy. Tod was “advised” by this Semite in Wardour Street. He obtained various agencies, but they were agencies for rather second-rate firms who built the cheaper and more dubious sort of car. Old Pumpelly had snaffled all the others. But the business moved; Tod’s taxi snorted about quite busily, took people to the station and to theatres, and staggered home again without an accident. The American touring car had a rather more gentlemanly and luxurious life, but then it was a summer car, and Tod had no spare driver. Miss Hornblower would commandeer it on occasions, and make Tod drive her up and down the front. He had bought her a fur coat, and all the young women in Horrox & Horrox’s were aware of Millie and her coat.

But the business moved. People came into the shop and bought things, tyres, petrol, oil, grease, repairing outfits, French chalk, sparking plugs, oil cans. Tod advertised himself as ready to undertake repairs, and Love—his driver-mechanic—was put to the test. Love was a fat little man, sallow, greasy, with a slight squint and an immense display of superficial self-assurance. He talked Tod into believing him an expert, pouring out streams of technical jargon with a sort of biblical gusto. “The mag” needed attention, or the “brasspot had a bit o’ fluff in its tummy.” Somebody’s “gears were bottoming,” or “she wanted her big-end rebushing.” Mr. Love always spoke of a car as “she,” and with an intimate and affectionate shrewdness that embraced the whole sex. Tod got a little breathless in trying to follow Mr. Love through all these feminine details and subtleties, poring over motor-manuals at night, and going to bed with his head full of “crown wheels” and “short circuits,” “lay shafts” and “forced-feed lubrication.” He did not desire this man Love to be a Mumbo-Jumbo, a Witch-doctor, a Priest of all the Mysteries in his business. He wanted to keep a grip on the greasy seat of Mr. Love’s trousers.

The driver-mechanic appeared to perform quite creditably upon one or two ramshackle machines that were entrusted to “Western’s Garage” for repairs. They ran when they left the repair shop, and that was good enough for Mr. Love.

“Good enough.” That was his great phrase, containing a philosophy so dear to the heart of the lazier sort of English artisan. If a car came back again at the end of a week, Mr. Love insinuated his greasy person into its entrails, spat, rubbed his hands on his trousers, and was ready with a learned explanation.

“Old, bag o’ bolts. She’d shake something loose every hundred miles.”

He talked the owners into dazed acquiescence.

“She wants ’er timing-wheels resetting, sir. Had ’em done by the village blacksmith—what? Of course. And the universal joint wants looking to, and her water-pipes are all fur and muck. There’s not much I don’t know about cars.”

Tod was very busy and very happy, and business shaped so well those first few months that Tod began to buy furniture and to think of marriage. He wanted Milly, and he wanted her very badly, for she had begun to provoke the natural man in him and spring was in the air.

She came hurrying into the garage one Wednesday afternoon, and found Tod in the little glass box of an office, entering up his books. Last month’s receipts were more than respectable, and Tod was remembering that he needed a summer suit.

“Oh, Toddy, dear!”

“Hallo!”

“It’s free—it’s to let.”

“What’s to let?”

“Why, our little house—that ducky house in Guildford Lane.”

She was flushed and greatly excited, and her enthusiasm had all the seduction of her sex.

“I’ve just seen the board up. The people are going out next week. I went in and asked.”

Tod got off his stool and kissed her.

“You want it, dear?”

She snuggled in close, ignoring Mr. Love, who was deep in the “innards” of a derelict car.

“Of course I want it. Don’t you, Toddy?”

“I want all sorts of things, and I want them so badly——”

“Oh, naughty boy! But it will be rather nice, won’t it, just you and me in that dinky house?”

“Let’s go and look at it,” said Tod, putting business behind him.

Needless to say, they took “Carnarvon,” with its pepper-pot turret, mock oak, casement windows, gravel path, and standard roses. Tod prepared to be married in June. The sun shone. All the pessimism of Uncle Remus and Mr. Rathbone Cragg seemed like so much senile snivelling.

About a week before Tod’s marriage Bob Twine strolled up Guildford Lane and slouched self-consciously through the gate of “Carnarvon.” It was six o’clock and he found Tod pottering about the house. Tod was in his shirt-sleeves, and his hair was rumpled, and Bob Twine caught him on his hands and knees in the kitchen, nailing down linoleum.

“Hallo, kid.”

Tod looked hot and happy, but quite pleased to see Twine.

“Hallo, Bob. What do you think of this pattern?”

“Classy. All alone, are you, and learning to be the handy man?”

“Come and look at the house,” said Tod, getting up with all the enthusiasm of a house-proud husband; “I’ve got the carpets down and most of the furniture in.”

“Hire purchase, system, old chap?”

“Well, it’s easier to begin with. I hope to wipe off the lot by next Christmas. Now look at this dining room suite. Millie chose it.”

“She did, did she? Mind if I light a cigarette?”

“Have one of mine. Aren’t those chairs jolly? And I think the carpet’s just splendid.”

They strolled over the house, and even the obtusely happy Tod could not help noticing that Bob Twine seemed glum and uneasy. The generous and innocent Tod explained his friend’s depression by wondering whether he was rubbing his own happiness into the raw of some discontent, and whether Bob Twine yearned greatly for a home of his own.

“Why don’t you get married and settle down?”

Twine stared, swallowed something, and laughed.

“I’m not made that way, old chap, and I haven’t the money.”

“But you’ll want to get married some day.”

“Talk about something else,” said Twine flippantly. “Wish I was in the army, somewhere east of Suez. God, that chap Kipling knows a bit.”

He threw the fag end of his cigarette into an empty grate, and became boisterously cheerful.

“Well, kid, you’ll be the solemn father of a family in ten years. Taking ’em down to paddle, and teaching ’em to swim. Queer, isn’t it, and you’re only a kid yourself. But—damn it—I wish you the best of luck, and I hope the girl knows you deserve it. Think I’ll be toddling. So long.”

Tod, holding a hammer in one hand and a box of tin-tacks in the other, watched the swarthy man slouch down the path.

“Poor old Bob,” he thought; “he wants a home and won’t say so.”

Twine was cursing women and himself.

“I ought to have told him, but, damn it—how could I? He’s like a blessed cherub blowing about with a hammer and a box of nails. Happy? My God! Oh, you little devil, I hope you’ll play game by him.”

A week later Tod was married. It was a quiet wedding, not nearly so decorative as Millie Hornblower would have desired. Her mother was the only relative who attended it, and Tod wondered why Mrs. Hornblower smelt of drink. The two bridesmaids came from Horrox’s, and Mr. Mann of the Furnishing Department gave Miss Hornblower away.

Old Tom Lavender served as Tod’s best man. Millie had said that he was far too old for it, but Tod had proved obstinate, for Tom Lavender had a younger heart than most young men. Uncle Remus was not there, and he sent no present. And away in the north the great Mr. Burgetrode was as silent as death.

The honeymoon lasted four days, Tod not caring to leave the business to Mr. Love and the garage boy. They spent the days at Maidenhead, Millie Hornblower’s choice, and they did much lolling in a punt on the river, a punt that refused to humour Tod’s first activities with a punt pole. But who cared about progress? There were over-hanging and shadowy trees, cushions, and a girl, a girl like a soft, white, sensuous flower with lips tinted red.

For the first six months of his marriage Tod was supremely happy. He had married a highly sexed young woman, a young woman who woke the dormant man in him and taught him to delight in new physical experiences. During those months Tod was the most passionate and uxorious of young husbands, and his wife’s sensual frankness rather pleased him. She wanted him and she wanted him with passion. His habits changed. His early morning swim became a thing of the past. He ceased to play games, for sex was the game of the moment, and Millie played it in all its variations. But she did not want children.

“Just you and me together—for a while—Toddy. Besides, we can’t afford them.”

They couldn’t.

The fact became very obvious to Tod. “Carnarvon” was a thirsty little house, and Tod had begun to glimpse his wife’s social ambitions. He was astonished at the number of things that appeared to be required for the efficient functioning of a genteel house. They had no piano, but a piano seemed to be a sign and symbol of grace, even though Millie could not play it. People were beginning to call, and Millie gave little afternoon bridge parties, and the cakes these people ate, and the cost of them, worried Tod. His wife’s clothes became a problem. Two good suits were sufficient for Tod, but the hunger of a woman’s wardrobe appeared to be insatiable. She wheedled Tod into sundry extravagances; but that was not the end of the tale, for when the finery had been bought, it had to be displayed. Tod found himself taking stalls at the local theatre and going there in evening dress. He even discovered himself in church, walking up the aisle with a young woman who rustled, a young woman who would never have set foot in the place had she been dressed in sackcloth.

That red mouth and those plump white arms dominated him during the first months of his marriage. He was proud of his wife, and rather proud of “Carnarvon,” and the calceolarias and the dog, and the maid in white cap and apron.

At the end of six months Tod began “doing figures.” The business was prospering, but Tod realised that its prosperity was not commensurate with Millie’s ideas upon expenditure.

Tod saw that he would have to expand.

He travelled up to town and saw the Semite of Wardour Street, produced figures, and stated his reasons for believing in a possible expansion of his venture. The result was the addition of two more taxis to Tod’s stud, supplied on a system of deferred payments; and the hiring of two more drivers. Tod had a weekly advertisement in the Shaston Gazette. The red-fronted garage in Duke Street had an air of industrious prosperity, and the garage boy began to call him “sir.”

But the surest proof of Tod’s success was the coming of Mr. Pumpelly. He was a succulent and cheerful old Christian with a facial resemblance to Father Christmas, and a partiality for loud check suits. Mr. Pumpelly had been the principal jobmaster in Shaston before the birth of the autocar, and he looked more the man of the horse than of the machine. Geniality was his great weapon. “Good old Josh—one of the best, do anything for anybody.” That was how Mr. Pumpelly glimpsed himself, and there was a bland and worldly cunning under his rosy good humour, a shrewdness that stood broad-bellied in the sunlight, and smiled.

Pumpelly strolled into Tod’s garage, and looked round with an air of obvious approval, and then discovered Tod, Tod who had just booked an order that spelt fifty pounds.

“Morning, Mr. Western. Nice little place you’ve got here.”

“It’s not bad,” said Tod.

“I was passing, and I dropped in to see whether you happened to have a couple of 700 by 85 Avons in stock. I’m out; they’re wanted urgently.”

“Afraid I haven’t. I could let you have a pair of Speedwells.”

“No thanks. Don’t touch ’em. This your office, is it? Mind me strolling in?”

Mr. Pumpelly strolled in with the genial casualness of a friend. He looked at everything with interest, even at Tod’s stool. Then he lit a cigarette.

“I’ll wire my London agents. Yes, a snug little place, and quite handy.”

And suddenly Mr. Pumpelly’s face beamed with the light of inspiration.

“Look here, Western, here’s an idea. Why shouldn’t we two fix up Shaston between us? We’d tap different ends, and we’d keep other people out. It’s an idea, ain’t it?”

“You mean we should go into partnership?” said Tod.

“That’s it. Why not?”

There was something in Tod that did not like Mr. Pumpelly, and he made one of those swift decisions that was to prove catastrophic so far as his future was concerned.

“Thanks, I prefer being on my own, but I’m obliged for the suggestion.”

“Think it over,” said Mr. Pumpelly with fatherly impressiveness; “it would be a good thing for you.”

Tod thought it over, and two days later he wrote a private letter to Mr. Pumpelly, refusing the offer of partnership. Mr. Pumpelly showed the letter to a nasty, dark, dapper little fellow who had become interested in Mr. Pumpelly’s business and was acting as manager.

“He’s one of the independent sort, Britt.”

Mr. Charles Britt passed a dirty forefinger across his little black moustache.

“If he wants competition he’ll get it. I didn’t work five years with the Solomons for nothing.”

Chapter Twenty-one

So Tod’s boyhood died. It just faded away and left him, and he hardly noticed that it had gone, and that it lay in the grave of his dead mother. With it had passed all that was fine and adventurous and free in Tod, that light of the morning look, the spirit of the boy bathing in the sea.

He was a preoccupied young man, sometimes with a frown on his face, and an air of sulky puzzlement. The business had begun to be irritating; it absorbed the whole of Tod, was never satisfied, kept him awake at night, and yet—like a fractious baby—was none the better for all the fussiness lavished on it. All sorts of exasperating things happened, and they happened in a way that made Tod feel very angry and very helpless.

Tod had become commercialised. Delilah had shorn the young Sampson, and he had become the slave of the Philistines. The curse of the civilisation of the West was upon him, the superstition that man was born to make things, sell things, and to accumulate money, that nothing mattered but money. And Tod was getting himself tangled up in the system just as thousands of other young men get entangled in it and come to believe that modern commercialism has been and is and will be for ever.

“Carnarvon” drove him daily into the scuffle with little half-petulant, half-wheedling cries.

“Oh, Toddy, we must have a Chesterfield sofa.”

Or “Clara Brown has got one of those new musquash coats.”

Display had meant expansion, and expansion had brought Tod into the presence of the economic god—Competition.

Mr. Julian Burgetrode could have lectured Tod on the subject of competition. He would have said that it was part of Nature, a heritage inherent in man, even wrapped up in his subconscious soul. It was emulation, virile pride, the spirit of adventure, the beads and feathers of the amorous savage, the jewel in the hilt of the sword of the hero. He would have told Tod that the wrong sort of people had got hold of the competition spirit. In other days there had been the Competition of Prophets, the Competition of Knights, the Competition of Poets, Painters and Scholars, the Competition of Cities over something finer than a herd of swine, the Competition of Builders in the soaring spires of their churches. These were noble emulations, emulations that the commercial man had trodden into the hog-wash of his sty. Mr. Julian Burgetrode had a ferocious contempt for the purely commercial man, and for the spirit of industrialism of nineteenth-century England. He had fought his way to the summit of things, he was a great captain of industry, he had explored the great barrack from cellar to roof. And that is what he called it: “A barrack.” “It won’t last,” he wrote to an American friend, “and if we try to make it last, it will come down and bury us. And I’m not so sure that I shall not be one of the first to get at the rotten brickwork with a pick.”

There were other sayings of Mr. Burgetrode’s that might have reminded Tod of his own father.

“We have created another sphinx and another riddle. The industrial revolution and our concentration on purely material things made us overpopulate ourselves with a swarm of slaves. The slaves are waking up, only to find that we are still the slaves of the god we have created. Too many millions of people—and food to be got for all! Our materialism is a chain round our necks. No wonder the Sphinx grins like a cynic.”

“Competition, yes—it’s necessary—as things are. It may be brutal and sordid, but it is the plain man’s only defence against greedy commercialists. These gentlemen have to use their knives on each other. Thanks to competition, they cannot give all their attention to cutting their pounds of flesh off the poor ass.”

“Trusts and Combines. There should be no trust or combine that is not state-owned for the benefit of everybody. I would have all trust magnates treated as highwaymen or pirates.”

“The joy in the job. We have got to get back to that, or perish.”

Tod Western was just beginning to butt his head blindly against all these problems, like a young man who was conscious of obstacles—and rivals. Man does a lot of butting before he learns to stand still, to reflect and to think. Most men can do nothing but butt all their lives, till Death comes behind and kicks them into oblivion. And Tod was getting well down and into the thick of it; but he played fair; that was his great disadvantage.

He was generous to his wife, and she wasted his money and worried him with her petty extravagances.

He trusted Love his mechanic, and Love robbed him in ingenious little ways that Tod was too big to notice.

He trusted his two new drivers, and they too robbed him, filching petrol, tools and oil, for Tod was an “employer,” and there is a certain sort of new citizen who thinks that it is his right to perpetrate any meanness upon the man who employs him.

These were minor matters. Tod did not notice them, for his consciousness was absorbed in sensing a vague obstruction that baffled the expansion of his business.

He began to remark all sorts of queer things.

None of the leading hotels ever ’phoned to Western’s garage for a car.

He had been unable to get himself appointed as agent by any of the bigger manufacturing firms, and he inferred that old Pumpelly had sucked that melon dry.

Nor was Tod satisfied with the work his taxis did at the station. So dissatisfied was he during the second summer that he played private investigator, and made the curious discovery that the porters appeared to hail a Pumpelly taxi before one of Western’s. His own drivers loafed in their seats, and did not seem concerned over the possible loss of fares and tips, but Tod saw that it was bad business if Pumpelly did three journeys to his two. And Pumpelly’s cars were more smartly kept than Tod’s; there was no doubt about it all.

Tod tackled his men. He was generous and hated accusing other men of slackness, but he had yet to learn that there is a type of man that responds only to necessity and fear.

“Look here, you chaps, I want you to be brisker. What about that dirty radiator? Take out your cushions, Smith, and let’s have a look at them.”

Smith’s cushions were a disgrace, and he roused Tod’s bile by being insolent over it.

“Look here, Smith, if you’ve got no conscience, find one, or I’ll sack you.”

Smith found a lick-and-a-scrape apology for a conscience, but he made up his mind to do Tod down. He was that sort of man.

Tod happened to be out on the London Road one evening, and he saw a big new boarding standing on a bank above the road. It warned tourists to Shaston that Pumpelly’s Garage was the best, and the only garage usable by a gentleman who respected his car. In fact Mr. Pumpelly lifted his leg over Tod and any other rival in the town. He was the leading agent for everything; he kept expert mechanics, even a consulting engineer. And Tod was annoyed.

He had an even larger board erected higher up the London Road, so that Western’s should be read before Pumpelly’s.

About that time Tod had his first quarrel with his wife, and like most first quarrels it was an absurd affair. Millie had indulged in some particular bit of selfish extravagance, and the arrival of the bill coincided with the rise in the level of Tod’s financial worries.

“It isn’t sport,” he told her hotly. “Haven’t I enough worry without this gorgeous waste of money?”

Millie passed from sulkiness to a fine, ranting fury, and from fury to tears, and the fool man was beaten when that dear dew ran down into her red mouth. It was the first time she had used the device against Tod, and he surrendered instantly on that occasion.

There was a reconciliation of sorts, and they sat on the sofa with Tod’s arm round his wife’s waist, and he tried to explain to her that he was puzzled and worried. And Millie was vaguely alarmed. She had regarded the business as booming, and Tod had never hinted at the malign influence that appeared to be checking its expansion.

“Of course it’s old Pumpelly,” she said.

“But there is plenty of room for both of us. I can’t see myself going out to spoil another man’s pitch.”

Tod’s wife had far more cunning than her man, and far more of the suspicious business spirit, the spirit that applauds honesty when honesty happens to pay.

“It’s business,” she told him; “any fool could tell you that. I’ll find out.”

She was as good as her word, and she discovered more in a week than Tod would have discovered in a year. Intuition helped her, the intuition of a young woman who had no false ideas on public morality, and who could put a plump forefinger unerringly on the sore that was eating into Western’s prosperity. Moreover, she had certain gossips and friends, and among them the wives of the local station-master and of a manager of one of the smaller hotels. They told her just what she had expected them to tell her. It was all so simple and so obvious that she thought Tod a fool for not having used the same methods of persuasion, and she was amazed with him for his lack of “smartness.”

“You are a kid,” she said a little contemptuously; “you have got a lot to learn, Toddy.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked good-temperedly.

“You don’t look after your own interests. Suppose you’ve gone round the hotels?”

“I sent them my card.”

She tittered, a vulgar little expression of scorn.

“Your card! You ought to have gone and seen all the hotel porters.”

“What for?”

“Who rings up for taxis? Why, the hotel porters, of course! Old Pumpelly tips them all, and that’s why he gets the orders.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Tod.

“Well, if you are so green as all that——! And I’ve found out that old Pumpelly has a ten-pound note divided up among the station porters each Christmas. You see, they are smarter than you each time.”

“It depends on how you look at it.”

“Does it? I thought you wanted to make the business a success! I shouldn’t be surprised, too, if Pumpelly hasn’t got at your drivers.”

“What d’you mean?” said Tod, with the battle-light in his blue eyes.

“Bribes ’em to be slack and let you down. Don’t be so simple. What you’ve got to do is to out-tip old Pumpelly. Go round to the hotels and tip the hotel porters a quid a-piece. You’ll get orders, and it will pay. And I’d sack Love and the others.”

Tod flared up as his father had flared up before him.

“Go round and bribe people! No, thank you. I’m hanged if I’ll do it.”

“You’re a fool,” she said tartly; “it’s money that counts.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Mr. Charlie Britt, the nasty, dark, dapper little fellow, now junior partner of the firm of Pumpelly & Britt, had set out to smash Western’s Garage. He had no spite against Tod as Tod, but Britt was combative and greedy, and he belonged to the cut-throat school of business men who believed in showing no mercy, and in tolerating no rival, if that rival could be eliminated. Charles Britt’s methods were the methods of the garrotter. Even political economists have admitted that business is non-moral and that the man who sets out to be nothing but a trader has logic on his side when he shuts up his Sunday conscience in his safe and uses his wits as a wrestler uses his cunning. But Britt was one of those men who work in the dark. He met Tod once or twice and was particularly pleasant and polite to him, and Tod’s nature was too generous and open for him to suspect of deliberately fouling him.

Western’s Garage had a run of bad luck. Two of Tod’s taxis were out of action during the summer’s busiest month, one with a seized engine, the other with a badly broken back axle. Smith was the offender in the matter of the seized engine, a deliberate offender perhaps, and Tod sacked him, but the mischief was done. Then Tod had trouble with a private owner whose car was said to have lost a couple of electric headlights in Western’s garage. The owner was so positive and so combative that Tod paid him the value of the headlights, but the incident worried him more than the loss of the money. He hated suspecting people, especially men who worked with and about him every day of the week. He spoke to Love about it, and Love’s self-assurance frothed like beer.

“I have an idea where they went all right. No, it wasn’t Sid Smith. D’you remember a tourin’ car with a dirty little Belgian chofer—stayed ’ere two nights? I guess the Belgian had ’em.”

Tod had to be satisfied with that.

The hoped-for expansion did not develop, and Tod began to realise that he was living beyond his means. He had his monthly payments to make to the Semite of Wardour Street, and these payments competed with the demands of “Carnarvon.” Tod saw that the obvious and sensible thing to do was to cut down his domestic expenses, concentrate everything on the business, and to bide his time.

He walked home one evening, having made up his mind that Millie would have to economise, and for the first time since his marriage he found himself driven into a critical attitude towards his wife. Something within him foresaw a “scene,” and Tod hated scenes, and in hating them, asked himself why they should be necessary. Surely it was his wife’s duty to back him up, and not to pout those red lips of hers whenever he tried to talk about money?

And suddenly he became aware of the stranger in his wife, a woman whom he did not know. Tod had been very much the slave of the business during the past year; he had met Millie across the table, behaved as the natural man to the natural woman, and yet he felt that they had drifted apart. He had glimpses of Millie as a golden-haired young woman floating about in a blue or cerise-coloured knitted coat, playing tennis, eating chocolates, reading cheap novels, gadding about to other women’s houses, and receiving other women into hers. She was out a very great deal, and knew people whom Tod had never met. There were phases of her life and of her day of which he was completely ignorant; he had never troubled his head about how she passed her time or where she went, not because he did not care, but because the world seemed good when she was happy. Yet, of late, there had been less sunshine at “Carnarvon,” less of that rhapsodic childishness and those melting exclamations of “Oh, Toddy, how lovely!” Clouds? Yes, Tod had been conscious of clouds, but he had not realised their significance.

He left that serious talk till after supper, and then lighting his pipe, began with the jocular air of a man who felt uncomfortable.

“I say, Old Thing, I want to have a talk with you.”

Millie was instantly on the alert. When a man pretends to be cheerful he is about to speak on those horrid subjects, retrenchment and reform.

“Oh? What about?”

“The business and the house. Come and sit on the sofa.”

But Millie preferred to stay where she was, and to hold sentiment and emotion in reserve.

“I knew you were going to be a sport, dear. The fact is we have had a run of bad luck, and I have got to go easy until I have paid off old Goldstein. What we must do is to live quietly until we have the business solidly established, and all the cars paid for.”

Millie asked him a question.

“What’s living quietly? Aren’t we living quietly now?”

It was a flank attack, an ambuscade, and Tod was thrown on the defensive.

“We seem to spend a lot. There must be some things we can cut out.”

“Supposing you tell me what they are.”

“You ought to know more about it than I do. Besides, I don’t want to be mean, dear; but you ought to be able to help.”

She held aloof and left him the responsibility of suggesting economies, knowing that she held Tod at a disadvantage.

“If you think I’m extravagant, I’d like you to say how I might do things differently.”

“We seem to spend a lot on cakes and stuff like that,” Tod blurted. “Couldn’t you make them at home?”

“With only one servant?”

“You might make them yourself, dear.”

“And my clothes, too, I suppose?”

“Some of them. Hang it all, it has got to be done, Old Thing. I’m saving every penny I can in the shop.”

She regarded him coldly.

“Have you been round the hotels yet?”

“No, and I don’t mean to.”

She shrugged.

“There you are; it’s always the way; a man expects a woman to do all the dirty work and the scraping.”

“Don’t,” said Tod. “Don’t talk like that, dear. It hurts.”

She had meant it to hurt, but she let him kiss her.

“All right; we’ll cut things down in the house, but don’t grumble if——”

“I shan’t grumble.”

He didn’t, even though his wife advertised her economies, and served them like a bad egg under his nose. Millicent’s theory was that if you make a man uncomfortable and deprive him of his little luxuries, he will develop energy and show a more aggressive spirit in the acquisition of money. She cut off Tod’s egg at breakfast, served him up unsavoury sorts of hashes, limited him to milk puddings, and warned him against wasting the gas. She made herself a dress, a flagrantly ugly and dowdy dress, and wore it like a martyr when Tod was there to see. Once or twice when he came home in the evening he found her lying on the sofa and complaining that she had a headache, and Tod was the tender husband.

“Poor wifey! How did it happen?”

“I’m tired. It’s the work in the house. I’ve been doing the washing.”

She had washed three handkerchiefs and a camisole; Bella—the maid—had dealt with the rest. But Tod was impressed, and he accepted his reduced rations and all the main discomforts of his wife’s economies, and he never murmured. His patience and his good temper annoyed Millie. The primitive woman in her would have had more respect for a man who got up and raged, and then rushed out with violence to spoil his neighbour. She did not understand Tod; she began to think him a fool.

But Millie’s personal economies were not prominent. She did not curtail her own pleasures, her gossips and her gaddings about, the little social excitements of which Tod knew nothing. She ate her sweet cakes at tea, when Tod had a sloppy cup and a couple of dry biscuits at the shop; she bought her chocolates, went to the theatre and the cinema, and ran bills at the drapers. She did not wear that home-made dress on any of her expeditions, and her vanity found Shaston seafront a mirror of delight.

Tod had friends in Shaston who were wiser in the ways of Western’s wife than the husband who stood grimly to business in his garage. Mrs. Western was “fast.” She was not fastidious, and not too proud to amuse herself with “pick-ups” on the front, strange young men who were out for the sex adventure during their holidays by the sea. Millie bathed. She went to the beach concerts, and struck up an acquaintance with the funny man of the troupe, a swarthy person with a look of sensual self-assurance and a prominent lower lip. Millie thought him “frightfully funny and so smart.” Also, he was rather deliciously bold and gave her guilty thrills.

People noticed her. It was part of her tragedy that she could never escape notice, with that red mouth and that shining head of hair. It was not the girl’s fault. Nature had designed her to be a woman of pleasure, a creature of strong appetites, and, provoking the same appetites in others, richly coloured creature to be captured and embraced. In Millie’s case it was marriage that was wrong. She was a provider of pleasure, not for one man, but many.

Bob Twine had taken an interest in Tod’s marriage, and he was one of those who beheld the ripening of Tod’s wife. Twine hated her as a man often hates a woman when he has had his will of her and then sees her fool his friend. Twine was a moocher, a “parade monger,” an expert in his knowledge of “girls.” He avoided Millie, and yet held her in view, and that roving soldier’s eye of his saw all that was happening.

Bob Twine had yet another man inside himself. He was a lovable reprobate, amusing, cynical, generous, an admirer of the virtues that he himself would not cultivate. He had an affection for Mossup and a clear admiration for Mossup’s wife. “She’s straight,” that was all he had to say of her, “and it takes something for a pretty woman to be straight.” He went often to the Mossups’ cottage, and sometimes they talked of Tod and Tod’s marriage, seriously and like good friends who wished Tod nothing but happiness.

“The kid’s made a mess of it,” Twine confided to Mossup. “How do I know? Because I’m a bad lot myself, and you want to be a bad lot to know anything about women.”

“How about me, Bob?”

“You! You know as much about women as I know about the Bible. One of the few good ones took you by the collar and you ought to be grateful.”

“I am, Twine, I’m very grateful,” and his weak eyes grew moist; “but do you think that Tod’s wife is—is immoral?”

Twine gave one of his short laughs.

“Same as me. I can’t keep away from the women, old chap; they’re so gorgeous. And Millie Western is just like me—with a difference. She can’t keep away from the men, the men who can bite. But she’s a liar, I’m not a liar.”

Arthur Mossup looked worried, and worry had tended to become a fixed factor in his life during the last six months. Like Tod, he was struggling in the world of unbridled competition, and the little business was like a half stifled plant making a pathetic struggle to get at the light and the public. Mossup was hard up, desperately hard up, and Olive was expecting a baby. The good fellow was not only a much harassed draper but a household drudge, and his wife adored him.

“Arthur’s such a dear,” she told Twine. “If only we could have a little bit of luck!”

“You deserve it,” he said, and added savagely, “some day I’ll go round with a red flag and a hatchet.”

He left half a sovereign in Mossup’s pocket after they had come near quarrelling over that piece of gold.

“Take it, you silly blighter. What do I want it for? It would only be thrown away.”

“You’re a good chap, Twine; you don’t do yourself justice.”

“Don’t I? You go and ask some of the girls.”

Now poor Mossup’s worries culminated in a crisis that caught his pale pride shivering like a half starved saint in a winter wind. Olive had given birth to a boy; she had been very near death in the anguish of that night, and her husband had about five shillings in his cashbox. They were in debt, too, to the tradesmen, and Olive wanted coal and delicacies. Poor Mossup’s heart was sore.

Tod was smoking his pipe in his den at “Carnarvon” and reading a trade journal, when he heard the door-bell ring. It was the maid’s evening out, and Millie was posing on the sofa with one of her headaches, so Tod went to the front door. He found Arthur Mossup standing there, a melancholy figure in the raw murk of a November evening, his spectacles wet with rain and his seedy old black mackintosh flapping open at the throat.