asking roundabout and careful questions, by leading both men and women
to the innocent expounding of certain points of view. Millionaires, it
appeared, did not expect to make allowances to men who married their
daughters; young women, it transpired, did not in the least realise that
a man should be liberally endowed in payment for assuming the duties
of a husband. If rich fathers made allowances, they made them to their
daughters themselves, who disposed of them as they pleased. In this
case, of course, Sir Nigel privately argued with fine acumen, it became
the husband's business to see that what his wife pleased should be what
most agreeably coincided with his own views and conveniences.

His most illuminating experience had been the hearing of some men,
hard-headed, rich stockbrokers with a vulgar sense of humour, enjoying
themselves quite uproariously one night at a club, over a story one
of them was relating of an unsatisfactory German son-in-law who had
demanded an income. He was a man of small title, who had married the
narrator's daughter, and after some months spent in his father-in-law's
house, had felt it but proper that his financial position should be put
on a practical footing.

"He brought her back after the bridal tour to make us a visit," said the
storyteller, a sharp-featured man with a quaint wry mouth, which seemed
to express a perpetual, repressed appreciation of passing events. "I had
nothing to say against that, because we were all glad to see her home
and her mother had been missing her. But weeks passed and months passed
and there was no mention made of them going over to settle in the
Slosh we'd heard so much of, and in time it came out that the Slosh
thing"--Anstruthers realised with gall in his soul that the "brute,"
as he called him, meant "Schloss," and that his mispronunciation was
at once a matter of humour and derision--"wasn't his at all. It was his
elder brother's. The whole lot of them were counts and not one of them
seemed to own a dime. The Slosh count hadn't more than twenty-five cents
and he wasn't the kind to deal any of it out to his family. So Lily's
count would have to go clerking in a dry goods store, if he promised to
support himself. But he didn't propose to do it. He thought he'd got on
to a soft thing. Of course we're an easy-going lot and we should have
stood him if he'd been a nice fellow. But he wasn't. Lily's mother used
to find her crying in her bedroom and it came ou