ignified!"

Of course, instantly after his tea he ought to have gone upstairs to
inspect the wounded victim of dogs. The victim was his own child, and
its mother was his wife. He knew that he ought to have gone upstairs
long since. He knew that he ought now to go, and the sooner the
better! But somehow he could not go; he could not bring himself to
go. In the minor and major crises of married life there are not two
partners, but four; each partner has a dual personality; each partner
is indeed two different persons, and one of these fights against the
other, with the common result of a fatal inaction.

The wickeder of the opposing persons in Edward Henry, getting the
upper hand of the more virtuous, sniggered. "Dirty teeth, indeed!
Blood-poisoning, indeed! Why not rabies, while she's about it? I
guarantee she's dreaming of coffins and mourning coaches already!"

Scanning nonchalantly the titles of the music rolls, he suddenly saw:
"Funeral March. Chopin."

"She shall have it," he said, affixing the roll to the mechanism. And
added: "Whatever it is!"

For he was not acquainted with the Funeral March from Chopin's
Pianoforte Sonata. His musical education had, in truth, begun only
a year earlier--with the advertisements of the "Pianisto" mechanical
player. He was a judge of advertisements, and the "Pianisto"
literature pleased him in a high degree. He justifiably reckoned that
he could distinguish between honest and dishonest advertising. He made
a deep study of the question of mechanical players, and deliberately
came to the conclusion that the Pianisto was the best. It was also the
most costly. But one of the conveniences of having six thousand pounds
a year is that you need not deny yourself the best mechanical player
because it happens to be the most costly. He bought a Pianisto, and
incidentally he bought a superb grand piano and exiled the old cottage
piano to the nursery.

The Pianisto was the best, partly because, like the vacuum-cleaner,
it could be operated by electricity, and partly because, by means of
certain curved lines on the unrolling paper, and of certain gun-metal
levers and clutches, it enabled the operator to put his secret ardent
soul into the music. Assuredly it had given Edward Henry a taste for
music. The whole world of musical compositions was his to conquer, and
he conquered it at the rate of about two great masters a month.
From Handel to Richard Strauss, even from Palestrina to Debussy,