t he respected me in mine, but though fate
thought fit for the present to place us in the one groove, yet our lives
were unmixable commodities as oil and water, which lay apart and would
never meet until taken in hand by the omnipotent leveller--death.

Marriage with Peter M'Swat!

Consternation and disgust held me speechless, and yet I was half inclined
to laugh at the preposterousness of the thing, when Peter's father
continued:

"I'm sorry if you've got smitten on Peter, but I know you'll he sensible.
Ye see I have a lot of children, and when the place is divided among 'em
it won't be much. I tell ye wot, old Duffy has a good bit of money and
only two children, Susie and Mick. I could get you to meet Mick--he mayn't
be so personable as our Peter," he reflected, with evident pride in his
weedy firstborn, and he got no farther, for I had been as a yeast-bottle
bubbling up, and now went off bang!

"Silence, you ignorant old creature! How dare you have the incomparable
impertinence to mention my name in conjunction with that of your boor of
a son. Though he were a millionaire I would think his touch
contamination. You have fallen through for once if you imagine I go out
at night to meet any one--I merely go away to be free for a few minutes
from the suffocating atmosphere of your odious home. You must not think
that because you have grasped and slaved and got a little money that it
makes a gentleman of you; and never you _dare_ to again mention my
name in regard to matrimony with any one about here;" and with my head
high and shoulders thrown back I marched to my room, where I wept till
I was weak and ill.

This monotonous sordid life was unhinging me, and there was no legitimate
way of escape from it. I formed wild plans of running away, to do what I
did not care so long as it brought a little action, anything but this
torturing maddening monotony; but my love for my little brothers and
sisters held me back. I could not do anything that would put me for ever
beyond the pale of their society.

I was so reduced in spirit that had Harold Beecham appeared then with a
matrimonial scheme to be fulfilled at once, I would have quickly erased
the fine lines I had drawn and accepted his proposal; but he did not
come, and I was unacquainted with his whereabouts or welfare. As I
remembered him, how lovable and superior he seemed in comparison with the
men I met nowadays: not that he was any better than these men in their
pla