no communist. Besides, she was
superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after
her marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him
much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly,
whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop. She
replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her head,
because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs. Higgins's, that it would
never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had not
quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before. They
broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed
by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the
effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been
thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his
pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at
one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he
agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning
with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first
meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. He
added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of the sort,
because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her
matrimonial chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it
after clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on
which retail trade is impossible.

This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy's
mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic
circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her
conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in
the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions
so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The
result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of
the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of
writing it.

Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable
and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable
way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for,
though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like
everyb