“You think so? Well, so do I _now_; and it was very unfortunate for me. It got me into many scrapes; it almost cost me my wife. You don’t know my wife? I must take you out to see her. I was introduced to her under somebody else’s name--not a very distinguished name, it is true, Smith, or Brown, or something, and under that name she accepted me; but when I told her how things really were, her countenance flamed like that of the angel, do you remember? in Milton, when Adam says something caddish--I forget what exactly. How she did look at me! ‘Ashamed of your name!’ she said, ‘and yet ask _me_ to share it!’ There is pride and pride,” said Mr. Tottenham to himself with musing admiration. “The poor dear mother thought she was proud; Mary _is_ so; that makes all the difference. I got into such trouble as I never was in all my life. She sent me right away; she would have nothing to say to me; she cast me off as you might cast away that cinder with that pair of tongs. For a time I was the most miserable fellow on the face of the earth. I wandered about the place where she lived night and day; but even then, if you will believe me, it cost me a very hard struggle indeed to get to the shop. When I was desperate, I did.” “Why is he telling _me_ all this, I wonder?” said Edgar to himself; but he was interested, he could not tell how, and had raised his head, and for the moment shaken off something of the burden from his own back. “I made up my mind to it, and went at last,” said this odd man, puffing at his cigar with a vehemence that made it evident he felt it still. “I found that nobody wanted me there; that everybody preferred not to be interfered with; that the managers had fallen each into his own way, and had no desire for me to meddle. But I am not the sort of man that can stand and look on with his hands in his pockets. You will wonder, and perhaps you will despise me, when I tell you that I found Tottenham’s on the whole a very interesting place.” “I neither wonder nor despise,” said Edgar. “What did you do?” “What didn’t I do?” said Mr. Tottenham, with rueful humour. “I did all the mischief possible. I turned the whole place upside down. I diminished the profits for that year by a third part. I changed the well-known good order of Tottenham’s into confusion worse confounded. The old managers resigned in a body. By-the-way, they stayed on all but one afterwards, when I asked them. As for the assistants, there was civil war in the place, and more than one free fight between the different sides; for some sided with me, perhaps because they approved of me, perhaps because I was the master, and could do what I liked; but the end was that I stayed there three months, worked there, and then wrote to Mary; and she took me back.” “I am very glad to hear it,” said Edgar; and he smiled and sighed with natural sympathy.