t the Scriptures were never wrong on a point of
human nature."

At which Rankin looked depressed; for he too was thinking of getting
married; though, as Maddox reminded him for his comfort, not to Miss
Flossie Walker.

"Is our Ricky-ticky," urged Rankin, "the man to show wisdom in
choosing a wife?"

"He isn't the man to marry at all."

"Did you expect him to live like an anchorite, then?"

"I didn't expect anything. He might have lived as he liked, provided
he didn't ruin himself as he's doing now."

And though Maddox now saw that young Delilah frequently, and always at
her prettiest and her best, he did not change his opinion.

CHAPTER LIII

It was now the third week in September, and the wedding was fixed for
the twenty-fifth of October. Everything was fixed, even Flossie's
ideas on the subject of her trousseau. There never was a little woman
so unwavering in her choice of such things as clothes and furniture.
To be married in ivory white, and to go away in powder blue; to have a
drawing-room furnished in imitation rosewood and tapestry, and a
dining-room in stamped velvet and black oak (imitation, too), had been
Flossie's firm determination from the first. It saves endless time and
contention when a young woman so absolutely knows her own mind.

Not but what she required approval and support in her decisions;
otherwise she would have been hardly recognizable as a young woman.
And for Rickman to go shopping with the Beaver in Tottenham Court
Road, to follow her undeviating course through the furniture
galleries, to note the infallible instinct by which she made for and
seized upon the objects of her choice, to see the austerity with which
she resisted the seductions of the salesman who sought to entangle her
with a more expensive article, the calmness of her mind in dealing
with the most intricate problems of measurement and price, was to be
led a helpless captive in a triumph of practical ability. Ability,
good Lord! was there ever anything like Flossie's grasp of all facts
that can be expressed in figures? His brain reeled before the
terrifying velocity of her mental arithmetic. What a little woman it
was to do sums in the top of its head!

Not that she dragged him on the chain for ever. There were idyllic
resting-places, delicious, thrilling pauses in her progress; when she
tried every chair in succession in the drawing-room suite; when she
settled herself in the tapestry one, before the little