I
wish I had had your common sense to guide me all these years."

"If you had, you would now be a clerk in the City earning thirty
shillings a week."

"And perhaps a happier man."

"Bosh, my dear Paul!" she said, shaking her head slowly. "Rot! Rubbish!
I know you too well. You adding up figures at thirty shillings a week,
with a common sense wife for I suppose you mean that--mending your
socks and rocking the cradle in a second-floor back in Hickney Heath!
No, my dear"--she paused for a second or two and her lips twitched
oddly--"common sense would have been the death of you."

He laughed in spite of himself. It was so true.

Common sense might have screwed him to a thirty shillings-a-week desk:
the fantastic had brought him to that very house, a candidate for
Parliament, in a thousand-guinea motor car. On the other hand--and his
laughter faded from his eyes--the fantastic in his life was dead.
Henceforward common sense would hold him in her cold and unstimulating
clasp. He said something of the sort to Jane. Once more she ejaculated
"Rot, rubbish and bosh!" and they quarrelled as they had done in their
childhood.

"You talk as if I didn't know you inside out, my dear Paul," she said
in her clear, unsmiling way. "Listen. All men are donkeys, aren't they?"

"For the sake of argument, I agree."

"Well--there are two kinds of donkeys. One kind is meek and mild and
will go wherever it is driven. The other, in order to get along, must
always have a bunch of carrots dangling before its eyes. That's you."

"But confound it all!" he cried, "I've lost my carrots--can't you see?
I'll never have any carrots again. That's the whole damned tragedy."

For the first time she smiled--the smile of the woman wiser in certain
subtle things than the man. "My dear," she said, "carrots are cheap."
She paused for an instant and added, "Thank God!"

Paul squeezed her arms affectionately and they moved apart. He sighed.
"They're the most precious things in the world," said he.

"The most precious things in the world are those which you can get for
nothing," said Jane.

"You're a dear," said he, "and a comfort."

Presently he left her and returned to his weary round of the
constituency, feeling of stouter heart, with a greater faith in the
decent ordering of mundane things. A world containing such women as
Jane and Ursula Winwood possessed elements of sanity. Outside one of
the polling stations he found Barney Bill holding forth