her
husband, urging her to save, called modest and becoming, and her
acquaintance to each other, when they spoke of her at all, which was
seldom for she was very negligible, called a perfect sight.

Mr. Wilkins, a solicitor, encouraged thrift, except that branch
of it which got into his food. He did not call that thrift, he called
it bad housekeeping. But for the thrift which, like moth, penetrated
into Mrs. Wilkins's clothes and spoilt them, he had much praise. "You
never know," he said, "when there will be a rainy day, and you may be
very glad to find you have a nest-egg. Indeed we both may."

Looking out of the club window into Shaftesbury Avenue--hers was
an economical club, but convenient for Hampstead, where she lived, and
for Shoolbred's, where she shopped--Mrs. Wilkins, having stood there
some time very drearily, her mind's eye on the Mediterranean in April,
and the wisteria, and the enviable opportunities of the rich, while her
bodily eye watched the really extremely horrible sooty rain falling
steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing omnibuses, suddenly
wondered whether perhaps this was not the rainy day Mellersh--Mellersh
was Mr. Wilkins--had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and
whether to get out of such a climate and into the small mediaeval
castle wasn't perhaps what Providence had all along intended her to do
with her savings. Part of her savings, of course; perhaps quite a
small part. The castle, being mediaeval, might also be dilapidated,
and dilapidations were surely cheap. She wouldn't in the least mind a
few of them, because you didn't pay for dilapidations which were
already there, on the contrary--by reducing the price you had to pay
they really paid you. But what nonsense to think of it . . .

She turned away from the window with the same gesture of mingled
irritation and resignation with which she had laid down The Times, and
crossed the room towards the door with the intention of getting her
mackintosh and umbrella and fighting her way into one of the
overcrowded omnibuses and going to Shoolbred's on her way home and
buying some soles for Mellersh's dinner--Mellersh was difficult with
fish and liked only soles, except salmon--when she beheld Mrs.
Arbuthnot, a woman she knew by sight as also living in Hampstead and
belonging to the club, sitting at the table in the middle of the room
on which the newspapers and magazines were kept, absorbed, in her turn,
in the first pag