reached my room. The
lamp burned clear and soft beside my blotting-pad. The fire glowed
cheerily, and Fanny had just swept the hearth, so that no speck showed
upon it. And my slippers were in the fender. Less than a year earlier
my homecomings had been singularly different; a dark, cold room in a
malodorous house, with very possibly a drunken couple brawling on the
landing outside.

But there were tears in Fanny's eyes. The mother was in one of her
vicious tempers, it seemed, and had gone to bed in her basement room
with the keys of larder and kitchen, and a bottle of gin. The
daughter's last meal had been whatever she could get for midday
dinner. And it was now nine o'clock in the evening.

'Just you wait there. Don't stir from where you arc. I'll be back in
three minutes,' I told her.

There was a ham and beef shop at the junction of Howard and Albany
Street. Thither I hastened. Leaving this convenient repository of
ready-cooked comestibles, I bethought me of the question of something
to drink. I was bent on doing this thing well, according to my lights.
Presently I reached my room again, armed with pressed beef, cold
chicken, bread, butter, mustard, salt, plates, cutlery, a segment of
vividly yellow cake, and, crowning triumph, a half bottle of Macon.

The Dickensian tradition rather suggests that the ripe experience of a
middle-aged _bon vivant_ is desirable in the host at such occasions.
Well, in that master's time youth may have lasted longer in life than
it does with us. My own notion is that mine was the ideal age for such
a part. I think of that little supper--Fanny's tremulous sips of
Burgundy from my wash-stand tumbler, the warm flush in her pale
cheeks, and the sparkle in her brown eyes--as crystallising a good
deal of the phase in which I was living just then. I am quite sure I
did it well, very well.

In buying those viands I knew I should keenly enjoy our little supper.
I pictured very clearly how delightful it would all seem to poor
Fanny; her flushed enjoyment; just what a rare treat the whole episode
would be for her. I knew how pleasantly that spectacle would thrill
me. I thought too, in a way, what a devilish romantic chap I was,
rushing out at night to purchase supper--and Burgundy; that was
important; claret would not have served--for a forlorn and unhappy
girl, who, but for my resourcefulness, would have gone starving to
bed. How oddly mixed the motives! The Burgundy, now; I believed it a
m