"Guess I've made a fool of myself this time. I do feel that 'shamed
of myself."

   She would not lose by it. We should respect her all the more.

   Last year, travelling on the Underground Railway, I met a man; he was
one of the saddest-looking men I had seen for years. I used to know
him well in the old days when we were journalists together. I asked
him, in a sympathetic tone, how things were going with him. I
expected his response would be a flood of tears, and that in the end
I should have to fork out a fiver. To my astonishment, his answer
was that things were going exceedingly well with him. I did not want
to say to him bluntly:

   "Then what has happened to you to make you look like a mute at a
temperance funeral?" I said:

   "And how are all at home?"

   I thought that if the trouble lay there he would take the
opportunity. It brightened him somewhat, the necessity of replying
to the question. It appeared that his wife was in the best of
health.

   "You remember her," he continued with a smile; "wonderful spirits,
always cheerful, nothing seems to put her out, not even—"

   He ended the sentence abruptly with a sigh.

   His mother-in-law, I learned from further talk with him, had died
since I had last met him, and had left them a comfortable addition to
their income. His eldest daughter was engaged to be married.

   "It is entirely a love match," he explained, "and he is such a dear,
good fellow, that I should not have made any objection even had he
been poor. But, of course, as it is, I am naturally all the more
content."

   His eldest boy, having won the Mottle Scholarship, was going up to
Cambridge in the Autumn. His own health, he told me, had greatly

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