d "respectable," after seven P.M., for a certain restricted
class of citizens--those who paid a particular impost known as
income-tax, as far as he could gather from what the tailor told him:
though the classes who really did any good in the state, the working men
and so forth, seemed exempted by general consent from wearing it. Their
dress, indeed, he observed, was, strange to say, the least cared for and
evidently the least costly of anybody's.

He admired the Monteith children so unaffectedly, too, telling them how
pretty and how sweet-mannered they were to their very faces, that he
quite won Frida's heart; though Robert did not like it. Robert had
evidently some deep-seated superstition about the matter; for he sent
Maimie, the eldest girl, out of the room at once; she was four years
old; and he took little Archie, the two-year-old, on his knee, as if to
guard him from some moral or social contagion. Then Bertram remembered
how he had seen African mothers beat or pinch their children till they
made them cry, to avert the evil omen, when he praised them to their
faces; and he recollected, too, that most fetichistic races believe in
Nemesis--that is to say, in jealous gods, who, if they see you love a
child too much, or admire it too greatly, will take it from you or do it
some grievous bodily harm, such as blinding it or maiming it, in order
to pay you out for thinking yourself too fortunate. He did not doubt,
therefore, but that in Scotland, which he knew by report to be a country
exceptionally given over to terrible superstitions, the people still
thought their sanguinary Calvinistic deity, fashioned by a race of stern
John Knoxes in their own image, would do some harm to an over-praised
child, "to wean them from it." He was glad to see, however, that Frida
at least did not share this degrading and hateful belief, handed down
from the most fiendish of savage conceptions. On the contrary, she
seemed delighted that Bertram should pat little Maimie on the head, and
praise her sunny smile and her lovely hair "just like her mother's."

To Philip, this was all a rather serious matter. He felt he was
responsible for having introduced the mysterious Alien, however
unwillingly, into the bosom of Robert Monteith's family. Now, Philip was
not rich, and Frida was supposed to have "made a good match of it"--that
is to say, she had married a man a great deal wealthier than her own
upbringing. So Philip, after his kind, thought m