I shall get sick of it, abandon my wife and depart, and she’ll get hold of her and make a profit out of her — in our class, of course, or higher. She told me the father was a broken-down retired official, who has been sitting in a chair for the last three years with his legs paralysed. The mamma, she said, was a sensible woman. There is a son serving in the provinces, but he doesn’t help; there is a daughter, who is married, but she doesn’t visit them. And they’ve two little nephews on their hands, as though their own children were not enough, and they’ve taken from school their youngest daughter, a girl who’ll be sixteen in another month, so that then she can be married. She was for me. We went there. How funny it was! I present myself — a landowner, a widower, of a well-known name, with connections, with a