rashly married a wife. There are men
whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single
life, but who from wilfulness or through circumstances they
could not cope with have flown in the face of its decrees.
There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.
Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his wife. She was
a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type
whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked
different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no
older. She gave me an impression of extraordinary tightness.
Her plain face with its narrow lips was tight, her skin was
stretched tightly over her bones, her smile was tight, her
hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the white drill
she wore had all the effect of black bombazine. I could not
imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having
married her why he had not deserted her. Perhaps he had,
often, and his melancholy arose from the fact that he could
never succeed. However far he went and in howsoever secret a
place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs. Nichols,
inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would
presently rejoin him. He could as little escape her as the
cause can escape the effect.

The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs
to no class. He is not embarrassed by the <i sans gene> of
the hobo, nor put out of countenance by the etiquette of the
prince. But Mrs. Nichols belonged to the well-defined class,
of late become vocal, which is known as the lower-middle.
Her father, in fact, was a policeman. I am certain that he was
an efficient one. I do not know what her hold was on the
Captain, but I do not think it was love. I never heard her speak,
but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation.
At any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her.
Sometimes, sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel,
he would become conscious that she was walking in the road outside.
She did not call him; she gave no sign that she was aware
of his existence; she merely walked up and down composedly.
Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain;
he would look at his watch and sigh.

"Well, I must be off," he said.

Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then. Yet he was a
man who had faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would
not have hesitated to fight a dozen unarmed niggers with
nothing but a revolver to help him. Someti