cial phenomenon
which chiefly roused you to just anger was the spectacle of wealthy
people making money and so taking the bread out of the mouths of people
who needed It. The only apparent blots on existence at Putney were the
noise and danger of the High Street, the dearth of reliable laundries,
the manners of a middle-aged lady engaged at the post office (Mrs.
Challice liked the other ladies in the post office), and the absence of
a suitable man in the house.

Existence at Putney seemed to Priam Farll to approach the Utopian. It
seemed to breathe of romance--the romance of common sense and kindliness
and simplicity. It made his own existence to that day appear a futile
and unhappy striving after the impossible. Art? What was it? What did it
lead to? He was sick of art, and sick of all the forms of activity to
which he had hitherto been accustomed and which he had mistaken for life
itself.

One little home, fixed and stable, rendered foolish the whole concourse
of European hotels.

"I suppose you won't be staying here long," demanded Mrs. Challice.

"Oh no!" he said. "I shall decide something."

"Shall you take another place?" she inquired.

"Another place?"

"Yes." Her smile was excessively persuasive and inviting.

"I don't know," he said diffidently.

"You must have put a good bit by," she said, still with the same smile.
"Or perhaps you haven't. Saving's a matter of chance. That's what I
always do say. It just depends how you begin. It's a habit. I'd never
really blame anybody for not saving. And men----!" She seemed to wish to
indicate that men were specially to be excused if they did not save.

She had a large mind: that was sure. She understood--things, and human
nature in particular. She was not one of those creatures that a man
meets with sometimes--creatures who are for ever on the watch to pounce,
and who are incapable of making allowances for any male frailty--smooth,
smiling creatures, with thin lips, hair a little scanty at the front,
and a quietly omniscient 'don't-tell-_me_' tone. Mrs. Alice Challice had
a mouth as wide as her ideas, and a full underlip. She was a woman who,
as it were, ran out to meet you when you started to cross the dangerous
roadway which separates the two sexes. She comprehended because she
wanted to comprehend. And when she could not comprehend she would
deceive herself that she did: which amounts to the equivalent.

She was a living proof that in her sex social disti