and making caustic speeches when he
was approached. Driven occasionally down to Stornham by actual pressure
of circumstances, he found the outlook there more embittering still.

Lady Anstruthers laid the bareness of the land before him without any
effort to palliate unpleasantness. If he chose to stalk about and look
glum, she could sit still and call his attention to revolting truths
which he could not deny. She could point out to him that he had no
money, and that tenants would not stay in houses which were tumbling to
pieces, and work land which had been starved. She could tell him just
how long a time had elapsed since wages had been paid and accounts
cleared off. And she had an engaging, unbiassed way of seeming to drive
these maddening details home by the mere manner of her statement.

"You make the whole thing as damned disagreeable as you can," Nigel
would snarl.

"I merely state facts," she would reply with acrid serenity.

A man who cannot keep up his estate, pay his tailor or the rent of his
lodgings in town, is in a strait which may drive him to desperation.
Sir Nigel Anstruthers borrowed some money, went to New York and made his
suit to nice little silly Rosalie Vanderpoel.

But the whole thing was unexpectedly disappointing and surrounded by
irritating circumstances. He found himself face to face with a state of
affairs such as he had not contemplated. In England when a man married,
certain practical matters could be inquired into and arranged by
solicitors, the amount of the prospective bride's fortune, the
allowances and settlements to be made, the position of the bridegroom
with regard to pecuniary matters. To put it simply, a man found out
where he stood and what he was to gain. But, at first to his sardonic
entertainment and later to his disgusted annoyance, Sir Nigel gradually
discovered that in the matter of marriage, Americans had an ingenuous
tendency to believe in the sentimental feelings of the parties
concerned. The general impression seemed to be that a man married purely
for love, and that delicacy would make it impossible for him to ask
questions as to what his bride's parents were in a position to hand
over to him as a sort of indemnity for the loss of his bachelor freedom.
Anstruthers began to discover this fact before he had been many weeks
in New York. He reached the realisation of its existence by processes of
exclusion and inclusion, by hearing casual remarks people let drop, by