was lifting the glass some one gave me a slap on the
back. It was my young brother.

"'Hullo, Charley!' he says. 'Fancy _you_ here.'

"'What are _you_ doing here?' I asked him. I realized he was as tall as
I was. 'Why aren't you at home?'

"'I'm coming home with you, Charley boy,' he says, looking round at the
girls. 'All the old talent here, you see!'

"I own frankly I was disgusted. I was so disgusted I never went into
that place again. We got the 12.20 at King's Cross and it was a quarter
past one in the morning before we arrived at our house. Here was a nice
state of things; the elder son finding his fifteen-year-old brother in
_El Vino_, and coming home with the milk. That was my brother's way all
along. He made everything I do seem a black sin. I left him to tell his
own story and turned in.

"The next morning he went on the carpet. My mother gave him a pretty hot
talking to. She told him he was a disgrace to the name of Carville, that
he'd begun bad and would go to worse. She asked him how she was ever to
get him into a position if he left school like that and for such a
reason. He took out a cigarette-case and helped himself. 'No need to
worry, mater,' says he, 'I've got a position already.'

"And so he had! He'd gone into the city and got a position in a big
wholesale house as a clerk. Ask me how he did it and all I can say is
'Personality.' He could do anything with anybody. There he was, fifteen,
with a guinea a week to start. And I was twenty-two and only getting a
few shillings more.

"After the first shock my mother resigned herself to the inevitable and
hoped for the best. And for a couple of years we managed to rub along
without any scandals. In our several ways, my brother and I were busy
with life, as far as we knew it. He went up to the city every day, and
played football and cricket, but the serious business of his life was
girls. He seemed to have hundreds. If I saw him in the Strand, on
Saturday, he would be with three or four. If I met him on Hadley Common,
on Sunday, he would have three or four there, but fresh ones. He had
them in the trains, he lunched with them in the city. Barring the few
hours he spent in our house at night he lived chiefly on girls. There
were a score or so in the house where he worked, a wholesale business in
Wood Street. It was a mania, you might say; but it was the girls who had
the mania, not he. He spent all his money as he got it on them, he
borrowed more and