may state, however, that the dress she chose
to wear was trimmed with Bearwarden's favourite colour; that she
carried a bunch of his favourite flowers on her breast and another in
her hair.

A brougham drawn by a pair of long, low, high-stepping horses, at
the rate of twelve miles an hour, is an untoward vehicle for serious
conversation when taking its occupants out to dinner, although well
adapted for tender confidence or mutual recrimination on its return
from a party at night. Lady Bearwarden could not even make sure that
her husband observed she had consulted his taste in dress. Truth
to tell, Lord Bearwarden was only conscious that his wife looked
exceedingly handsome, and that he wished they were going to dine at
home. Marriage had made him very slow, and this inconvenient wish
lasted him all through dinner, notwithstanding that it was his
enviable lot to sit by a fast young lady of the period, who rallied
him with exceeding good taste on his wife, his house, his furniture,
manners, dress, horses, and everything that was his. Once, in
extremity of boredom, he caught sight of Maud's delicate profile
five couples off, and fancied he could detect on the pale, pure face
something of his own weariness and abstraction. After that the fast
young lady "went at him", as she called it, in vain. Later, in the
drawing-room, she told another damsel of her kind that "Bruin's
marriage had utterly spoilt him. Simply ruination, my dear! So unlike
men in general. What he could see in her I can't make out! She looks
like death, and she's not _very_ well dressed, in my opinion. I wonder
if she bullies him. He used to be such fun. So fast, so cheery, so
delightfully satirical, and as wicked as Sin!"

Maud went home in the brougham by herself. After a tedious dinner,
lasting through a couple of hours, enlivened by the conversation of
a man he can't understand, and the persecutions of a woman who bores
him, it is natural for the male human subject to desire tobacco, and
a walk home in order to smoke. Somehow, the male human subject never
does walk straight home with its cigar.

Bearwarden, like others of his class, went off to Pratt's, where, we
will hope, he was amused, though he did not look it. A cigar on a
close evening leads to soda-water, with a slice of lemon, and, I had
almost forgotten to add, a small modicum of gin. This entails another
cigar, and it is wonderful how soon one o'clock in the morning comes
round again. When