pancakes. Illuminated calendars, gramophones, corsets, picture
postcards, Manilla cigars, bridge-scorers, chocolate, exotic fruit, and
commodious mansions--these seemed to be the principal objects offered
for sale in High Street. Priam bought a sixpenny edition of Herbert
Spencer's _Essays_ for four-pence-halfpenny, and passed on to Putney
Bridge, whose noble arches divided a first storey of vans and omnibuses
from a ground-floor of barges and racing eights. And he gazed at the
broad river and its hanging gardens, and dreamed; and was wakened by the
roar of an electric train shooting across the stream on a red causeway a
few yards below him. And, miles off, he could descry the twin towers of
the Crystal Palace, more marvellous than mosques!

"Astounding!" he murmured joyously. He had not a care in the world; and
Putney was all that Alice had painted it. In due time, when bells had
pealed to right and to left of him, he went home to her.


_Collapse of the Putney System_


Now, just at the end of lunch, over the last stage of which they usually
sat a long time, Alice got up quickly, in the midst of her Stilton, and,
going to the mantelpiece, took a letter therefrom.

"I wish you'd look at that, Henry," she said, handing him the letter.
"It came this morning, but of course I can't be bothered with that sort
of thing in the morning. So I put it aside."

He accepted the letter, and unfolded it with the professional
all-knowing air which even the biggest male fool will quite successfully