res, and adored the right
music. My God, how that woman bored me! She is charming still, and she
lives in the little red brick house in Kensington, with Morris papers and
Whistler's etchings on the walls, and gives the same nice little dinner
parties, with veal creams and ices from Gunter's, as she did twenty years
ago."

Philip did not ask by what means the ill-matched couple had separated, but
Athelny told him.

"Betty's not my wife, you know; my wife wouldn't divorce me. The children
are bastards, every jack one of them, and are they any the worse for that?
Betty was one of the maids in the little red brick house in Kensington.
Four or five years ago I was on my uppers, and I had seven children, and
I went to my wife and asked her to help me. She said she'd make me an
allowance if I'd give Betty up and go abroad. Can you see me giving Betty
up? We starved for a while instead. My wife said I loved the gutter. I've
degenerated; I've come down in the world; I earn three pounds a week as
press agent to a linendraper, and every day I thank God that I'm not in
the little red brick house in Kensington."

Sally brought in Cheddar cheese, and Athelny went on with his fluent
conversation.

"It's the greatest mistake in the world to think that one needs money to
bring up a family. You need money to make them gentlemen and ladies, but
I don't want my children to be ladies and gentlemen. Sally's going to earn
her living in another year. She's to be apprenticed to a dressmaker,
aren't you, Sally? And the boys are going to serve their country. I want
them all to go into the Navy; it's a jolly life and a healthy life, good
food, good pay, and a pension to end their days on."

Philip lit his pipe. Athelny smoked cigarettes of Havana tobacco, which he
rolled himself. Sally cleared away. Philip was reserved, and it
embarrassed him to be the recipient of so many confidences. Athelny, with
his powerful voice in the diminutive body, with his bombast, with his
foreign look, with his emphasis, was an astonishing creature. He reminded
Philip a good deal of Cronshaw. He appeared to have the same independence
of thought, the same bohemianism, but he had an infinitely more vivacious
temperament; his mind was coarser, and he had not that interest in the
abstract which made Cronshaw's conversation so captivating. Athelny was
very proud of the county family to which he belonged; he showed Philip
photographs of an Elizabethan mansion, and told