“Well, she might not be your style, you know; but still she was undeniably pretty. Talking about style, by-the-bye, I saw your old flame, Mrs. Croft, yesterday. I suppose you are not touchy about a fellow speaking his mind concerning her? You had a miss there—such as a man might have of losing his life. I’d as lief be married to the devil. Croft asked me up to dinner, and I don’t think that madame liked it; at any rate, she made herself so confoundedly disagreeable that Croft seemed downright ashamed of her. And didn’t she nag him! that is enough. He broke a vase on the drawing-room chimney-piece after dinner, and I never heard a poor beast so pitched into in all my life. And before the servants, too! If she had said the one-half to me she said to him, I should not have minded doing six months for what I would have given her. A man was telling me a good thing about Croft the other day. It appears he had been complaining to some of his wife’s male relations about the way she goes on, and this fellow, some fool of a swell, did not seem able to make out what exact fault Croft laid to her charge. ‘Isn’t she pwoper?’ he drawled out. ‘Proper!’ says Croft, in that sharp off-hand way of his, ‘damnably proper.’ Ah, we may laugh at it,” went on Mr. Black, doubtless speaking figuratively, for he was not laughing, and not a ghost of a smile could have been detected on Arthur’s face; “but it must be the very deuce to be tied to a woman like that. While she was going on at him, blowing him up sky-high, and sweeping about in her grand dress, with a crinoline big enough to have camped out under, I thought of your wife, Squire, and I said to a man this very morning, not half-an-hour ago,— “Well, Dudley must be a deuced lucky fellow—not merely to have missed that woman, but to have got the wife he has. There is no sham there—no angel one day, and devil the next.” Arthur cleared his throat. He felt as though he were choking; he wanted to make some withering speech in answer to this officious fool, but he was not quick of wit nor ready with repartee.