ng to an altered system of impressions,
so here, during that brief walk, a new disgust was born in him. The
showy-looking main street with its gingerbread buildings, all new and
glittering with paint, appalled him. The larger villas--self-conscious
types all reeking with plaster and false decorations--set him shivering.
He turned into his own street and his heart sank. Something had indeed
touched his eyes and he saw new and terrible things. The row of houses
looked as though they had come out of a child's playbox. They were all
untrue, shoddy, uninviting. The waste space on the other side of the
unmade street, a repository for all the rubbish of the neighborhood,
brought a groan to his lips. He stopped before the gate of his own
little dwelling. There were yellow curtains in the window, tied back
with red velvet. Even with the latch of the gate in his hand, he
hesitated. A child in a spotted velveteen suit and a soiled lace
collar, who had been playing in the street, greeted him with an amazed
shout and then ran on ahead.

"Mummy, come and look at Daddy!" the boy shrieked. "He's cut off all
the hair from his lip and he's got such funny clothes on! Do come and
look at his hat!"

The child was puny, unprepossessing, and dirty. Worse tragedy than
this, Burton knew it. The woman who presently appeared to gaze at him
with open-mouthed wonder, was pretentiously and untidily dressed, with
some measure of good looks woefully obscured by a hard and unsympathetic
expression. Burton knew these things also. It flashed into his mind as
he stood there that her first attraction to him had been because she
resembled his ill-conceived idea of an actress. As a matter of fact,
she resembled much more closely her cousin, who was a barmaid. Burton
looked into the tragedy of his life and shivered.

"What in the name of wonder's the meaning of this, Alfred?" his better
half demanded. "What are you standing there for, looking all struck of
a heap?"

He made no reply. Speech, for the moment, was absolutely impossible.
She stood and stared at him, her arms akimbo, disapproval written in her
face. Her hair was exceedingly untidy and there was a smut upon her
cheek. A soiled lace collar, fastened with an imitation diamond brooch,
had burst asunder.

"What's come to your moustache?" she demanded. "And why are you dressed
like--like a house-painter on a Sunday?"

Burton found his first gleam of consolation. A newly-discovered sense
of humor