g enough, they talked scandal. The Holdocks lived in an
old-fashioned house with a big brick garden not a mile from the McPhees,
for they stayed by their money as their money stayed by them; and in
summer you met their brougham solemnly junketing by Theydon Bois or
Loughton. But I was Mrs. McPhee's friend, for she allowed me to convoy
her westward, sometimes, to theatres where she sobbed or laughed or
shivered with a simple heart; and she introduced me to a new world of
doctors' wives, captains' wives, and engineers' wives, whose whole talk
and thought centred in and about ships and lines of ships you have never
heard of. There were sailing-ships, with stewards and mahogany and
maple saloons, trading to Australia, taking cargoes of consumptives and
hopeless drunkards for whom a sea-voyage was recommended; there were
frowzy little West African boats, full of rats and cockroaches, where
men died anywhere but in their bunks; there were Brazilian boats whose
cabins could be hired for merchandise, that went out loaded nearly
awash; there were Zanzibar and Mauritius steamers and wonderful
reconstructed boats that plied to the other tide of Borneo. These were
loved and known, for they earned our bread and a little butter, and we
despised the big Atlantic boats, and made fun of the P. & O. and Orient
liners, and swore by our respective owners--Wesleyan, Baptist, or
Presbyterian, as the case might be.

I had only just come back to England when Mrs. McPhee invited me to
dinner at three o'clock in the afternoon, and the notepaper was almost
bridal in its scented creaminess. When I reached the house I saw that
there were new curtains in the window that must have cost forty-five
shillings a pair; and as Mrs. McPhee drew me into the little
marble-papered hall, she looked at me keenly, and cried:

"Have ye not heard? What d' ye think o' the hatrack?"

Now, that hat-rack was oak-thirty shillings, at least. McPhee came
down-stairs with a sober foot--he steps as lightly as a cat, for all his
weight, when he is at sea--and shook hands in a new and awful manner--a
parody of old Holdock's style when he says good-bye to his skippers. I
perceived at once that a legacy had come to him, but I held my peace,
though Mrs. McPhee begged me every thirty seconds to eat a great deal
and say nothing. It was rather a mad sort of meal, because McPhee and
his wife took hold of hands like little children (they always do after
voyages), and nodded and win