hen I got home my brother and my mother were
having it out. He didn't care. It was all over for him, he admitted.
Better let him start afresh somewhere else. My mother wanted to send him
to Canada, where she had relatives, but he said he'd be damned if he
went to Canada. He was sick of clerking. What did he want to do? I asked
him. He said he was going in for engineering. I smiled at this, and he
rounded on me. 'Oh I don't mean your engineering,' he says. 'I mean
something that's worth while.' Very sneering he was.

"Well, do you know what he did? He got fifty pounds out of my mother to
start with and disappeared. That's all. Simply vanished without a word.
In a way it was a relief. We gave out that he had gone to Canada and the
scandal died down. A month later my uncle wrote and mentioned that
Frank had called on him and borrowed fifty pounds to go to New Zealand
with. I don't know how he managed to do it, for my uncle doesn't let go
easy at all. He has had to work for his money too hard. Personality, I
suppose. If my brother had had a five-minute personal interview with the
Lord Mayor I daresay he would have got the old chap to pay the fine for
him.

"After this little brush-up my mother and I jogged along for a few years
as quiet as before. I was still in my job as manager's assistant, and
still reading away into the classics. I was about twenty-five when all
my ideas and prejudices slid away over side and I found I had got the
disease we call love. It nearly killed me."

Mr. Carville paused and leaned over to knock his pipe against the
geranium-tub. We did not interrogate him. There was something numbing to
me in the thought of this quiet ordinary little man telling us in a
quiet matter-of-fact tone that love had nearly killed him. We had no
comment worthy of the fact. He looked across the valley for a moment as
though lost in retrospection.

"She came home from a convent in Brussels," he continued, feeling for
his little brass box, "and to use the slang of our professional class,
her people knew my people. That was the way we talked. If a thing was
good, we called it 'ripping.' If it was unpleasant, we said it was
'beastly.' I believe the slang has changed since then, but the silly
artificial spirit of it will never change. Why can't educated people
speak English?

"She came home from a convent in Brussels. Her home was about a mile
off, a big house in East Barnet, and she called with her mother one day
when