ABSTRACT
ABOUT five years ago I returned from India, with my pension of a thousand a year, as a retired civilian. During the thirty-five years I had lived in that land of the sun, I had managed to save ten thousand pounds, which, being invested at ten per cent, gave me another thousand a year. With an income of two thousand pounds, and all our children provided for, my wife and I not unreasonably hoped and expected to live comfortably, the more so as neither of us was given to extravagance, and we both cared little for the fashionable conventionalities of life. When we came home from the East, I was fifty-five years of age, and my better half ten years my junior: ages at which people look forward rather to quiet enjoyment of life than to making a show, or cutting a dash, in the world. We took a small house in Kensington, laid out a few hundred pounds in furnishing it, jobbed a neat one-horse brougham by the month, engaged a cook, a housemaid, and a parlour-maid, and set ourselves to work to renew old friendships and re-make old acquaintances, which in our long long exile had / dropped in arrear. Being a member of the Oriental and the Conservative Clubs, I managed to pass my forenoons pretty quickly. By the time I had breakfasted, smoked my cheroot as I walked through the Park to Hanover-square or St. James’s-street, it was always past twelve o’clock. Once at the club, I made a great show of writing a letter or two, read the papers, had some lunch, talked over the villanies of Sir Charles Wood, and the financial reforms of Mr. Wilson or Mr. Laing, 1 with some old Bengal chum, and, before I knew where I was, the clock pointed to four, at which hour my wife always called for me in the brougham, and we went for a drive. A seven o’clock dinner, a couple of stalls at the theatre or Opera twice a week, and so to bed, like a moderate-minded steady-going middle-aged couple, as we were.
