s, the callow,
cigarette-smoking youths, the dressed up, unnatural replicas of his own
wife and himself, with whom he was occasionally forced to hold futile
conversation. He hated the sly punch in the ribs from one of his
quondam companions, the artful murmur about getting the missis to look
another way and the hurried visit to a neighboring public-house, the
affected anger and consequent jokes which followed upon their return.
As they walked homeward, the cold ugliness of it all seemed almost to
paralyze his newly awakened senses. It was their social evening of the
week, looked forward to always by his wife, spoken of cheerfully by him
even last night, an evening when he might have had to bring home friends
to supper, to share a tin of sardines, a fragment of mutton, Dutch
cheese, and beer which he himself would have had to fetch from the
nearest public-house. He wiped his forehead and found that it was wet.
Then Ellen broke the silence.

"What I should like to know, Alfred, is--what's come to you?" she
commenced indignantly. "Not a word have you spoken all the evening--you
that there's no holding generally with your chaff and jokes. What Mr.
and Mrs. Johnson must have thought of you, I can't imagine, standing
there like a stick when they stopped to be civil for a few minutes, and
behaving as though you never even heard their asking us to go in and
have a bite of supper. What have we done, eh, little Alf and me? You
look at us as though we had turned into ogres. Out with it, my man.
What's wrong?"

"I am not--"

Burton stopped short. The lie of ill-health stuck in his throat. He
thirsted to tell the truth, but a new and gentle kindliness kept him
speechless. Ellen was beginning to get a little frightened.

"What is it that's come to you, Alfred?" she again demanded. "Have you
lost your tongue or your wits or what?"

"I do not know," he answered truthfully enough. His manner was so
entirely non-provocative that her resentment for a moment dropped.

"What's changed you since yesterday?" she persisted. "What is it that
you don't like about us, anyway? What do you want us to do?"

Burton sighed. He would have given a great deal to have been able to
prevaricate, but he could not. It was the truth alone which he could
speak.

"I should like you," he said, "to take down your hair and throw away all
that is not real, to wash it until it is its natural color, to brush it
hard, and then do it up quite simply, without a