and required a lot of extra furnishing. The studio wasn't as good
as my other one had been, and there was only an apology for a garden.
But Eva had her wish. People called on her, and finding her pretty,
vivacious, clever in her quick Irish way, they took her up and made a
fuss of her. She was invited here and there, and of course her personal
expenditure rose in consequence. Unfortunately my work didn't increase
in proportion. I had the bad luck to fall ill--the only time in my life
I've ever had an illness--and for several months I was unable to touch a
brush. Of course I had a little money put by, and with ordinary prudence
we should have pulled through all right. But Eva had never learned
prudence. She had lived all her life in an atmosphere of debt and
dunning creditors and over in easy-going old Ireland no one cared a
straw if one were in debt or no. So to my horror when I was convalescent
I found my foolish little wife had been running up enormous bills.
Everything was in arrears. The housekeeping money had gone to pay for
her daily amusements, the servants were unpaid, the tradespeople
clamouring."

He laughed, rather drearily.

"Well, I sold out a little stock I had and set matters right or so I
thought. I put the rest of the money in the bank and told Eva she must
be rather careful. But imagine my horror when one day she came to me,
whimpering with fright, and confessed she had several personal bills
unpaid and the creditors were pressing her. At first she did not tell me
the whole truth. She prevaricated, showed me one or two bills not made
up to date, and was vague about the different amounts. Finally she owned
that she was in debt for nearly five hundred pounds."

"Five hundred pounds!" It was Toni's first interruption.

"Yes. Sounds a lot, doesn't it? We'd only been married a year. Still
there was nothing for it but to realize some more capital, and I did it,
and then asked for the bills. She brought them unwillingly, after a vain
attempt to get me to entrust the payment to her; and to my surprise and
relief, I found that three hundred would cover the lot."

"But----"

"Oh, it didn't--by a long way. By dint of a good deal of persuasion, I
got it out of my wife that the rest was owing to different friends for
bridge and racing debts. Of course I had forgotten that my little Irish
wife was a born horse-lover, and, I'm sorry to say, gambler; and I ought
not to have been surprised. But I was. And I'm afr