“There’s fate for you, if you like!” he exclaimed, with uplifted forefinger. “There’s the impossibility of evading destiny or escaping from a foreordained environment! Out of all the girls in the world, George had fixed his affections on that particular one; he had gone straight to her, as it were; and, for my part, I can’t doubt that the very thing he hated, and she hated too, had, all the same, served in some mysterious way to bring them together. And there was the situation! Not only was George, as a man, forbidden the escape which he had prayed for, but Stretchley’s was brought into contact with the ‘Sky-high Tailoring Company’! No doubt you are all familiar with its advertisements--chubby boys in sailor suits, square-legged little girls in velveteen, dress-suits at thirty-seven and sixpence! I need not enlarge on the subject; it’s distasteful. It is enough to say that any connection between Stretchley’s and the Sky-high was to George’s mind almost unthinkable. Observe, then, the curious and distressing psychological situation. As a man, he hated Stretchley’s; as Stretchley’s, he loathed and despised the Sky-high. His love--his most unfortunate love--was in conflict at once with his personal feelings and with his professional pride. And what of her? When he grew calmer, George entered on that subject with some fulness. She had suffered, exactly as he had, from the obsession of the family business, in the shadow of which she had been bred, to a half-share in which she had succeeded on her father’s death. In early days, before fortune came, she had even been dressed from the stock! Like George, she had looked to marriage for a complete change of life and associations. It was not to be. And, more than that, she was acutely conscious of what George must feel. Her training and the family atmosphere had not failed to teach her that. She knew only too well how Stretchley’s would feel towards the Sky-high. And George was Stretchley’s, and she was the Sky-high! One sometimes reads of _mésalliances_ in the papers or meets them among one’s acquaintance. Never have I met one like this. The very fact of the occupation being in essence the same intensified the discrepancy and the contrast. Which, gentlemen, would surprise and, I may say, shock you more--that a duke should marry oil or soap, or that a really first-class purveyor should take his bride from a fried fish shop? No man of perception can hesitate. It is within the bounds of the same occupation that the greatest contrasts, the greatest distance, the greatest gulfs of feeling are to be found. I value an otherwise painful experience because it exhibited that philosophic truth in so vivid and striking a manner. You would sooner ask the Commander-in-Chief to lend a hand with a wheelbarrow than propose to him to take command of a corporal’s guard. Your _chef_ would no doubt put on the coals to oblige a lady, but not to oblige a thousand ladies would he wash the dishes!”