there was Mr.
Lucullus Fyshe, who made soda-water, but at the same time everybody
knew that he had the best collection of broken Italian furniture on the
continent; there wasn't a sound piece among the lot.

And there was the similar example of old Mr. Feathertop. He didn't
exactly _collect_ things; he repudiated the name. He was wont to say,
"Don't call me a collector, I'm _not_. I simply pick things up. Just
where I happen to be, Rome, Warsaw, Bucharest, anywhere"--and it is to
be noted what fine places these are to happen to be. And to think that
Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would never put his foot outside of the United
States! Whereas Mr. Feathertop would come back from what he called a
run to Europe, and everybody would learn in a week that he had picked
up the back of a violin in Dresden (actually discovered it in a violin
shop), and the lid of an Etruscan kettle (he had lighted on it, by pure
chance, in a kettle shop in Etruria), and Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown would
feel faint with despair at the nonentity of her husband.

So one can understand how heavy her burden was.

"My dear," she often said to her bosom friend, Miss Snagg, "I shouldn't
mind things so much" (the things she wouldn't mind were, let us say,
the two million dollars of standing timber which Brown Limited, the
ominous business name of Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, were buying that year)
"if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown _did_ anything. But he does _nothing_. Every
morning after breakfast off to his wretched office, and never back till
dinner, and in the evening nothing but his club, or some business
meeting. One would think he would have more ambition. How I wish I had
been a man."

It was certainly a shame.

So it came that, in almost everything she undertook Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown had to act without the least help from her husband.
Every Wednesday, for instance, when the Dante Club met at her house
(they selected four lines each week to meditate on, and then discussed
them at lunch), Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to carry the whole burden of
it--her very phrase, "the whole burden"--alone. Anyone who has carried
four lines of Dante through a Moselle lunch knows what a weight it is.

In all these things her husband was useless, quite useless. It is not
right to be ashamed of one's husband. And to do her justice, Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown always explained to her three hundred intimates that
she was _not_ ashamed of him; in fact, that she _refused_ to be. But it
was hard to see him brou