sorry for you, Randall."

As if he could afford it now, Mr. Usher permitted himself a return to
geniality. He paused in the doorway.

"If at any time you should want a hamper, you've only got to say so."

And Randall did not blame him. He said to himself: "Poor old thing. It's
funk--pure funk. He's afraid he may have to take her back himself. And
who could blame him?"

Funny that his father-in-law should have taken the same line as his
Uncle Randall. Only, whereas his Uncle Randall had reckoned with the
alternative of divorce, his father-in-law had not so much as hinted at
the possibility.

* * * * *

It was almost as if Mr. Usher had had a glimpse of what was to come when
he had been in such haste, haste that had seemed in the circumstances
hardly decent, to saddle Ransome with the responsibility.

For, if Ransome had really thought that Violet was going to let him off
without his paying for it, the weeks that followed brought him proof
more than sufficient of his error. He had sown to the winds in the
recklessness of his marriage and of his housekeeping, and he reaped the
whirlwind in Violet's bills that autumn shot into the letter box at
Granville.

He called there every other day for letters; for he was not yet
prepared, definitely, to abandon Granville.

The bills, when he had gathered them all in, amounted in their awful
total to twenty pounds odd, a sum that exceeded his worst dreams of
Violet's possible expenditure. He had realized, in the late summer and
autumn of last year, before the period of compulsory retirement had set
in, that his wife was beginning to cost him more than she had ever done,
more than any woman of his class, so far as he knew, would have dreamed
of costing; and this summer, no sooner had she emerged triumphant
than--with two children now to provide for--she had launched out upon a
scale that fairly terrified him. But all her past extravagance did
nothing to prepare him for the extent to which, as he expressed it, she
could "go it," when she had, as you might say, an incentive.

The most astounding of the bills his whirlwind swept him was the bill
from Starker's--from Oxford Street, if you please--and the bill (sent in
with a cynical promptitude) from the chemist in Acacia Avenue at the
corner. That, the chemist's, was in a way the worst. It was for scent,
for toilette articles, strange yet familiar to him from their presence
in his father's shop,