ring three hundred
and forty-one pounds?

Still no sign of Nellie, though he purposely made a noisy rattle with
his ebon walking-stick. Then the maid burst out of the kitchen with a
tray and the principal utensils for high tea thereon. She had a guilty
air. The household was evidently late. Two steps at a time he rushed
upstairs to the bathroom, so as to be waiting in the dining-room at
six precisely, in order, if possible, to shame the household and fill
it with remorse and unpleasantness. Yet ordinarily he was not a very
prompt man, nor did he delight in giving pain. On the contrary, he was
apt to be casual, blithe and agreeable.

The bathroom was his peculiar domain, which he was always modernizing,
and where his talent for the ingenious organization of comfort, and
his utter indifference to aesthetic beauty, had the fullest scope.
By universal consent admitted to be the finest bathroom in the Five
Towns, it typified the whole house. He was disappointed on this
occasion to see no untidy trace in it of the children's ablution;
some transgression of the supreme domestic law that the bathroom must
always be free and immaculate when father wanted it would have
suited his gathering humour. As he washed his hands and cleansed his
well-trimmed nails with a nail-brush that had cost five shillings and
sixpence, he glanced at himself in the mirror, which he was splashing.
A stoutish, broad-shouldered, fair, chubby man, with a short bright
beard and plenteous bright hair! His necktie pleased him; the elegance
of his turned-back wristbands pleased him; and he liked the rich down
on his forearms.

He could not believe that he looked forty-three and a half. And yet
he had recently had an idea of shaving off his beard, partly to defy
time, but partly also (I must admit) because a friend had suggested to
him, wildly, perhaps--that if he dispensed with a beard his hair might
grow more sturdily ... Yes, there was one weak spot in the middle
of the top of his head, where the crop had of late disconcertingly
thinned! The hairdresser had informed him that the symptom
would vanish under electric massage, and that, if he doubted the
_bona-fides_ of hairdressers, any doctor would testify to the value of
electric massage. But now Edward Henry Machin, strangely discouraged,
inexplicably robbed of the zest of existence, decided that it was not
worth while to shave off his beard. Nothing was worth while. If he was
forty-three and a half, he