g to the advice of his new-found friends,
of course she looked like nothing else so much as a barn-yard chicken in
turkey-cock's feathers. He was shocked to find that her size in gloves
was seven-and-a-quarter, and in boots something over four, and that sort
of thing naturally irritates a woman more even than finding fault with
her immortal soul. I guess for about a year he made her life pretty well
a burden for her, trying to bring her up to the standard of the Saturday-
to-Monday-at-Brighton set with which he had surrounded himself, or which,
to speak more correctly, had got round him. She'd a precious sight more
gumption than he had ever possessed, and if he had listened to her
instead of insisting upon her listening to him it would have been better
for him. But there are some men who think that if you have a taste for
champagne and the ballet that proves you are intended by nature for a
nob, and he was one of them; and any common-sense suggestion of hers only
convinced him of her natural unfitness for an exalted station.

"He grumbled at her accent, which, seeing that his own was acquired in
Lime-house and finished off in the Minories, was just the sort of thing a
fool would do. And he insisted on her reading all the society novels as
they came out--you know the sort I mean,--where everybody snaps everybody
else's head off, and all the proverbs are upside down; people leave them
about the hotels when they've done with them, and one gets into the habit
of dipping into them when one's nothing better to do. His hope was that
she might, with pains, get to talk like these books. That was his ideal.

"She did her best, but of course the more she got away from herself the
more absurd she became; and the rubbish and worse that he had about him
would ridicule her more or less openly. And he, instead of kicking them
out into the mews--which could have been done easily without Grosvenor
Square knowing anything about it, and thereby having its high-class
feelings hurt--he would blame her when they had all gone, just as if it
was her fault that she was the daughter of a respectable bootmaker in the
Mile End Road instead of something more likely than not turned out of the
third row of the ballet because it couldn't dance, and didn't want to
learn.

"He played a bit in the City, and won at first, and that swelled his head
worse than ever. It also brought him a good deal of sympathy from an
Italian Countess, the sort you