aid he. 'Who the----Oh! now I remember----I
don't know. Yes,' he went on, turning back to the fire, 'I remember now,
Charley. I don't suppose I looked very well from your point of view, but
all the same you haven't come home with a dagger in your sleeve, have
you?' He laughed. 'By Jove, you weren't prowling along that road
to-night waiting to stab me, were you, Charley? Like some bally
foreigner.'

"'You know I wasn't,' I said. 'And besides, I had no selfish reasons for
asking. I thought you might be engaged.'

"'I engaged?' he said, and shook his head. 'I'm not a marrying man. I
wonder if we're going to die out, we Carvilles. Rotten race, anyhow. We
seem to have no luck with our women. The mater was the only one. You
should have seen them at the funeral. My God! No luck with our women,
Charley. A natural tendency towards the lower middle classes. Don't you
ever feel it? Like splashing through mud in dress pumps. I do. It's our
curse, I believe. The Curse of the Carvilles!'

"I was so dumfounded at this unexpected piece of gratuitous slander that
I sat perfectly still, although the silent servant in black had come in
and announced dinner, and my brother was telling me to go and have a
spruce-up in his dressing room. It was like being knocked on the head
with a wooden mallet. I was stunned. Even when I found myself in a small
room full of bureaus and wardrobes and had nearly walked into a double
full-length mirror, I still felt stunned. He wondered if we were going
to die out, did he. And he assumed, with a blood-freezing fatalism, that
we both had a depraved taste in women. I looked round helplessly for a
wash-stand and caught sight of a bath-room beyond a blue portiere. A
natural tendency towards the lower-middle class, if you please! And I
was just on the point of telling him about my sweetheart in Genoa! Going
into the bath-room, I almost fell into a porcelain bath set in flush
with the floor. A huge basin full of hot water stood ready under the
nickelled faucets. Soaps of many colours lay at hand. Nail-scrubbers,
manicuring tools, towels, sponges, creams, talcum powders, dentifrices,
hair-lotions, blue bottles (with vermilion labels marked poison), green
bottles marked ammonia, bottles with bulbs and sprays, cases of razors,
festoons of strops--all these stood or lay on shelves at my elbow as I
proceeded to wash my hands and face with a piece of yellow primrose soap
that by some chance was among the welter of expe