hing,
that breakfast; and yet it was everything. No breakfast could have been
better. He had probably eaten about fifteen thousand hotel breakfasts
before Alice taught him what a real breakfast was. After serving it she
lingered for a moment, and then handed him the _Daily Telegraph_, which
had been lying on a chair.

"Here's your _Telegraph_," she said cheerfully, tacitly disowning any
property or interest in the _Telegraph_. For her, newspapers were men's
toys. She never opened a paper, never wanted to know what was going on
in the world. She was always intent upon her own affairs. Politics--and
all that business of the mere machinery of living: she perfectly ignored
it! She lived. She did nothing but live. She lived every hour. Priam
felt truly that he had at last got down to the bed-rock of life.

There were twenty pages of the _Telegraph_, far more matter than a man
could read in a day even if he read and read and neither ate nor slept.
And all of it so soothing in its rich variety! It gently lulled you; it
was the ideal companion for a poached egg; upstanding against the
coffee-pot, it stood for the solidity of England in the seas. Priam
folded it large; he read all the articles down to the fold; then turned
the thing over, and finished all of them. After communing with the
_Telegraph_, he communed with his own secret nature, and wandered about,
rolling a cigarette. Ah! The first cigarette! His wanderings led him to
the kitchen, or at least as far as the threshold thereof. His wife was
at work there. Upon every handle or article that might soil she put soft
brown paper, and in addition she often wore house-gloves; so that her
hands remained immaculate; thus during the earlier hours of the day the
house, especially in the region of fireplaces, had the air of being in
curl-papers.

"I'm going out now, Alice," he said, after he had drawn on his finely
polished boots.

"Very well, love," she replied, preoccupied with her work. "Lunch as
usual." She never demanded luxuriousness from him. She had got him. She
was sure of him. That satisfied her. Sometimes, like a simple woman who
has come into a set of pearls, she would, as it were, take him out of
his drawer and look at him, and put him back.

At the gate he hesitated whether to turn to the left, towards High
Street, or to the right, towards Oxford Road. He chose the right, but he
would have enjoyed himself equally had he chosen the left. The streets
through whic