y employed them. Six and
sevenpence was not merely all that remained to her of her dress
allowance; it was all that remained to her of her household allowance
till the next Monday.

Hence her nerves.

There that poor unfortunate woman lay, with her unconscious tyrant of a
husband snoring beside her, desolately wakeful under the night-light in
the large, luxurious bedroom--three servants sleeping overhead,
champagne in the cellar, furs in the wardrobe, valuable lace round her
neck at that very instant, grand piano in the drawing-room, horses in
the stable, stuffed bear in the hall--and her life was made a blank for
want of fourteen and fivepence! And she had nobody to confide in. How
true it is that the human soul is solitary, that content is the only
true riches, and that to be happy we must be good!

It was at that juncture of despair that she thought of mandarins. Or
rather--I may as well be frank--she had been thinking of mandarins all
the time since retiring to rest. There MIGHT be something in Charlie's
mandarin theory.... According to Charlie, so many queer, inexplicable
things happened in the world. Occult--subliminal--astral--thoughtwaves.
These expressions and many more occurred to her as she recollected
Charlie's disconcerting conversations. There MIGHT.... One never knew.

Suddenly she thought of her husband's pockets, bulging with silver,
with gold, and with bank-notes. Tantalizing vision! No! She could not
steal. Besides, he might wake up.

And she returned to mandarins. She got herself into a very morbid and
two-o'clock-in-the-morning state of mind. Suppose it was a dodge that
DID work. (Of course, she was extremely superstitious; we all are.) She
began to reflect seriously upon China. She remembered having heard that
Chinese mandarins were very corrupt; that they ground the faces of the
poor, and put innocent victims to the torture; in short, that they were
sinful and horrid persons, scoundrels unfit for mercy. Then she
pondered upon the remotest parts of China, regions where Europeans
never could penetrate. No doubt there was some unimportant mandarin,
somewhere in these regions, to whose district his death would be a
decided blessing, to kill whom would indeed be an act of humanity.
Probably a mandarin without wife or family; a bachelor mandarin whom no
relative would regret; or, in the alternative, a mandarin with many
wives, whose disgusting polygamy merited severe punishment! An old
mandarin al