e poor devil profoundly if I
had. Good night, old chap."

The hall door shut, and Chetwynd went slowly, sorrowfully back to the
drawing-room.

"I hope you have disgraced me enough to-night," he said stormily.

"Where's the disgrace, I should like to know, in inviting a couple of
old friends into one's own house?" demanded Saidie aggressively.

Chetwynd promptly turned his back upon her. "I am addressing my
wife," he said frigidly.

"Yes; I would like to see you talking to _me_ in that tone of voice,"
returned his sister-in-law.

"Bella, what have you to say for yourself? Have you no self-respect
whatever, and no consideration for your husband's position?"

"Oh, I'm sick of hearing about your position," said his wife
pettishly. "In the days when you had not any, we were a lot happier.
You didn't turn up your nose at my associates when I was on the
boards at the Band Box! Everything was charming. You laughed then at
what you now call "vulgar," and you thought it good fun, and you
would have taken the property man to your heart if I had told you he
was my brother. But now I am your wife it is quite a different tale.
My friends are too common for you to mix with. By the Lord! I'm not
at all certain whether you think _me_ good enough for you, myself."

"Bella, Bella!"

"Oh! Yes, it is easy enough to look broken-hearted. How dare you turn
my friends out of the place? It is you, not I, who have brought
disgrace upon us by introducing a stranger here and mortifying and
humbling me in front of him. If the Dosses are good enough for me,
they are good enough for my husband."

"My dear wife, they are not good enough for you. There is the whole
truth. Why are you so altered? Why will you not listen to me and take
my advice as you used to do? Have you forgotten how happy we once
were with each other?"

There was a little break in his voice, but Bella was too incensed to
heed it.

"You mean that you did not abuse me when you had it entirely your own
way! Wonderful! Perhaps you did not know that you bored me to death
the whole time. And now you have got it at last. I'm tired of your
cheap gentility and Brummagem pretensions; sick to death of hearing
that nothing I have been used to is "proper." If my world is a second
rate one, show me a better. Why don't you introduce me to your own,
if it is so vastly superior? Have you done it? Not you! You bury me
in this poky little hole and deliberately insult the only friends I