mirers and the offspring of mutual affection had eaten or would
shortly eat. In the High Street all was luxury: not a necessary in the
street. Even the bakers' shops were a mass of sultana and Berlin
pancakes. Illuminated calendars, gramophones, corsets, picture
postcards, Manilla cigars, bridge-scorers, chocolate, exotic fruit, and
commodious mansions--these seemed to be the principal objects offered
for sale in High Street. Priam bought a sixpenny edition of Herbert
Spencer's _Essays_ for four-pence-halfpenny, and passed on to Putney
Bridge, whose noble arches divided a first storey of vans and omnibuses
from a ground-floor of barges and racing eights. And he gazed at the
broad river and its hanging gardens, and dreamed; and was wakened by the
roar of an electric train shooting across the stream on a red causeway a
few yards below him. And, miles off, he could descry the twin towers of
the Crystal Palace, more marvellous than mosques!

"Astounding!" he murmured joyously. He had not a care in the world; and
Putney was all that Alice had painted it. In due time, when bells had
pealed to right and to left of him, he went home to her.

_Collapse of the Putney System_

Now, just at the end of lunch, over the last stage of which they usually
sat a long time, Alice got up quickly, in the midst of her Stilton, and,
going to the mantelpiece, took a letter therefrom.

"I wish you'd look at that, Henry," she said, handing him the letter.
"It came this morning, but of course I can't be bothered with that sort
of thing in the morning. So I put it aside."

He accepted the letter, and unfolded it with the professional
all-knowing air which even the biggest male fool will quite successfully
put on in the presence of a woman if consulted about business. When he
had unfolded the thing--it was typed on stiff, expensive, quarto
paper--he read it. In the lives of beings like Priam Farll and Alice a
letter such as that letter is a terrible event, unique, earth-arresting;
simple recipients are apt, on receiving it, to imagine that the
Christian era has come to an end. But tens of thousands of similar
letters are sent out from the City every day, and the City thinks
nothing of them.

The letter was about Cohoon's Brewery Company, Limited, and it was
signed by a firm of solicitors. It referred to the verbatim report,
which it said would be found in the financial papers, of the annual
meeting of the company held at the Cannon Street