His wife takes up the dish in silence, and leaves the apartment, whereupon two of the children, disappointed of their bread and butter, begin to cry. Roland Tresham, after threatening to turn them out of the room if they do not hold their tongues, leaves his seat and leans out of the open window, disconsolately. What a position it is in which to find his father’s son! Outside, his neighbours are sitting in their shirt sleeves, smoking clay pipes in their strips of garden, or hanging over the railings talking with one another; in the road itinerant merchants are vending radishes, onions, and shellfish; whilst a strong, warm smell is wafted right under his nostrils from the pork-pie shop round the corner. Inside, the children are whimpering for the return of their mother round a soiled table-cloth which bears a piece of salt butter, warm and melting, a jar of treacle with a knife stuck in it, a stale loaf, a metal teapot, and knives and forks which have been but half-cleaned. A vision comes over Roland of that art-decorated drawing-room in Blue Street, with the porcelain tea-service, the silken clad figure, and the subtle perfume that pervaded the scene; and a great longing for all the delicacies and refinements of life comes over him, with a proportionate disgust for his surroundings. When his wife returns with the beefsteak, he pushes it from him. His appetite has vanished with the delay. ‘I can’t eat it,’ he says impatiently. ‘Take the filth away.’ ‘Well, it’s the best I can do for you,’ is her reply. ‘It’s quite enough for a woman to be nurse and housemaid, without turning cook into the bargain.’ ‘It is a long time since I have expected you to do anything to please me, Juliet; however, stop the mouths of those brats of yours, and send them to bed. I want the room to myself. I have work which must be done this evening.’ She supplies the children’s wants, and hurries them from the room, whilst her husband sits sulking and dreaming of Blue Street. If his brother-in-law can only get him a foreign appointment, how gladly he will fly from this squalid home for ever. He pictures a life by the shores of the Mediterranean, in the forests of Brazil, on the plains of India, or the Australian colonies, and each and every one seems a paradise compared with that which he leads at present.