this season.
He sauntered along leisurely, watching the people and the carriages
with apparently the same degree of interest as he had done for the
past ten years. I have heard that long ago he had a good tenor voice,
and he used to speak authoritatively of great singers, when they
really were great singers, not such as now.... I've never seen him
talking to anybody in the park, and I've never seen him smoke; yet his
lips are seldom at rest. They have now got a motion something between
that of a nervous American with a cigar and a cow chewing the cud.
This is the result of the movableness of his artificial teeth. Perhaps
an extra visit to his dentist was an item of expenditure not to be
lightly incurred.

What appeared to be corresponding feminine types were to be seen in
profusion. Women with incomes of one hundred, two hundred, three
hundred a year, women who had passed the age either of matrimony or
naughtiness. What thousands of friendless and lonely people there must
be in this great Dingy City! The class that lies on the grass is more
sociable; they are free from a thousand tyrannies that oppress the
mediocracy.

The face of a woman dressed in black, seated between two children,
seemed familiar; not until she bowed did I recognise her as the wife
of an old friend who had been killed in Ladysmith. She used to be the
prettiest officer's wife of his smart regiment; and from her account
it would have been better if she had not been so pretty, or the
regiment so smart. She was now left with barely his pension for
herself and the two children to live on.... Yet very bravely,
apparently, she had faced the change!

"Oh, I have tried various things for the last couple of years," she
said, "but I am afraid there is nothing I can do. I even tried the
stage for a time." She used to have a good voice. "But the managers
were horrid, and the pay was very small. Then I tried to give music
lessons; but what I got was hardly worth the distances I had to go; so
now I have to settle down to working out daily problems in domestic
economy."

"And all your friends?"

"Oh, they all were very nice and kind; but one cannot go about without
being properly dressed, and when one keeps refusing invitations, one
gradually becomes forgotten in time. I felt rather lonely just now
when I saw the people driving down to Hurlingham. Come along, chicks,
we must be going now. You see," she said, "it is a long 'bus ride to
our little flat."