Then an editor and his wife--the editor of "The Food Regenerator," if you please--and a dark, unwholesome looking, wizened little man, who I am sure would have been the better for a good rubbing with sand-paper and emery powder. His wife was a plaintive, helpless, hapless, washed-out woman, who, sidling apologetically about in a frowsy costume of some yellow-white woollen stuff, made me think of a dirty white cat--a likeness I was sorry to have forced on me when I had heard a bit of her history; for the only wonder is how she's kept courage enough to go on dressing or living at all. It seems that _M. le mari_ is by way of being a social as well as dietetic regenerator, and is as full of uncomfortable fads as man can be. They have no fortune, unless you reckon as such seven small children, and over and over again he's thrown up a good appointment or salary because he "must be free to write his convictions--great truths the world needs." And to lighten matters still further, he believes that service should be bartered, not paid for in coin; so they could almost never have a servant, and when they did get one it was of course some poor wretch who was glad to shelter herself on any terms for the moment, but who could be trusted no more than puss in the dairy. Besides carrying her own fardel, this poor wife was expected to fold and direct wrappers for her husband's precious journal, he finding "mechanical writing too exhausting and stultifying." Next--let me see--two gentlemen, bachelors, one a pugnacious fellow-countryman to whose tremendous r-r's my heart warmed in this lisping land of Cockaigne--a proof-reader at one of the great publishing houses; the other as curious a specimen as I've encountered--a man of sixty or so, of courtly manners, an ex-Anglican parson, an ex-Catholic convert, a present "seeker after truth"--a man who knows something about everything and believes the last thing--but sure of nothing save that this world's a comfortable place, and loving nothing, one would swear, but his pug dog, a superb creature, fairly uncanny for wisdom, but a vilely ill-tempered beast, gurr-ing if one but looked at it.