with an imprecation, he
had muttered: "For shake o' the children," and sank into a chair.
Winifred, having picked up the revolver, gave him some soda water. The
liquor had a magical effect. Life had illused him; Winifred had never
'unshtood'm.' If he hadn't the right to take the pearls he had given her
himself, who had? That Spanish filly had got'm. If Winifred had any
'jection he w'd cut--her--throat. What was the matter with that?
(Probably the first use of that celebrated phrase--so obscure are the
origins of even the most classical language!)

Winifred, who had learned self-containment in a hard school, looked up at
him, and said: "Spanish filly! Do you mean that girl we saw dancing in
the Pandemonium Ballet? Well, you are a thief and a blackguard." It had
been the last straw on a sorely loaded consciousness; reaching up from
his chair Dartie seized his wife's arm, and recalling the achievements of
his boyhood, twisted it. Winifred endured the agony with tears in her
eyes, but no murmur. Watching for a moment of weakness, she wrenched it
free; then placing the dining table between them, said between her teeth:
"You are the limit, Monty." (Undoubtedly the inception of that phrase
--so is English formed under the stress of circumstances.) Leaving Dartie
with foam on his dark moustache she went upstairs, and, after locking her
door and bathing her arm in hot water, lay awake all night, thinking of
her pearls adorning the neck of another, and of the consideration her
husband had presumably received therefor.

The man of the world awoke with a sense of being lost to that world, and
a dim recollection of having been called a 'limit.' He sat for half an
hour in the dawn and the armchair where he had slept--perhaps the
unhappiest half-hour he had ever spent, for even to a Dartie there is
something tragic about an end. And he knew that he had reached it.
Never again would he sleep in his dining-room and wake with the light
filtering through those curtains bought by Winifred at Nickens and
Jarveys with the money of James. Never again eat a devilled kidney at
that rose-wood table, after a roll in the sheets and a hot bath. He took
his note case from his dress coat pocket. Four hundred pounds, in fives
and tens--the remainder of the proceeds of his half of Sleeve-links, sold
last night, cash down, to George Forsyte, who, having won over the race,
had not conceived the sudden dislike to the animal which h