Gosling was one of the world's successes. He had started life as a National School boy, and had worked his way up through all the grades--messenger, office-boy, junior clerk, clerk, senior clerk, head clerk, accountant--to his present responsible position as head of the counting-house, with a salary of £26 a month. He rented a house in Wisteria Grove, Brondesbury, at £45 a year; he was a sidesman of the church of St John the Evangelist, Kilburn; a member of Local Committees; and in moments of expansion he talked of seeking election to the District Council. A solid, sober, thoroughly respectable man, Gosling, about whom there had never been a hint of scandal; grown stout now, and bald--save for a little hair over the ears, and that one persistent grey tress which he used as a sort of insufficient wrapping for his naked skull. Such was the George Gosling seen by his wife, daughters, neighbours, and heads of the firm of wholesale provision merchants for whom he had worked for forty-one years in Barbican, E.C. Yet there was another man, hardly realized by George Gosling himself, and apparently so little representative that even his particular cronies in the office would never have entered any description of him, if they had been obliged to give a detailed account of their colleague's character. Nevertheless, if you heard Gosling laughing uproariously at some story produced by one of those cronies, you might be quite certain that it was a story he would not repeat before his daughters, though he might tell his wife--if it were not too broad. If you watched Gosling in the street, you would see that he took a strange, unaccountable interest in the feet and ankles of young women. And if many of Gosling's thoughts and desires had been translated into action, the Vicar of St John the Evangelist would have dismissed his sidesman with disgust, the Local Committees would have had no more of him, and his wife and daughters would have regarded him as the most depraved of criminals. Fortunately, Gosling had never been tempted beyond the powers of his resistance. At fifty-five, he may be regarded as safe from temptation. He seldom put any restraint upon his thoughts, outside business hours; but he had an ideal which ruled his life--the ideal of respectability. George Gosling counted himself--and others counted him also--as respectable a man as could be found in the Metropolitan Police area. There were, perhaps, a quarter of a million other men in the same area, equally respectable. 2 As he was drying his hands, Gosling heard the front door slam and his daughters' voices in the passage below, followed by a shrill exhortation from the kitchen: "Now, gels, 'urry up, dinner's all ready and your father's waitin'!" Gosling trotted downstairs and received the usual salute from his two girls. He noted that they were a shade more effusive than usual. "Want more money for fal-lals," was his inward comment. They were always wanting money for "fal-lals."