used.

"I am terribly sorry, Major," said he, "but what you ask is impossible.
I don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules
of the agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an
outsider; I am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help.
I do hope you understand--"

"There is no one," said Brown, "who understands discipline better than I
do. Thank you very much. Good night."

And the little man withdrew for the last time.

He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance
Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in
her languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly
that she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades
provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who
went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a
murderer.

The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa,
and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged--except,
perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine
unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of
abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by
the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the
title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so
many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that he will realize
the rest of those purple adventures in a better world.

Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top
of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave
us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor
parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented
by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow
streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a
narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you
do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was
civiliz