pile, the Grand Babylon Hotel, save a heap of ruins. And, further, she
genuinely did cause him to feel that throughout his career he had always
missed the very best things of life, through being an uncherished,
ingenuous, easily satisfied man. A new sensation for him! For if any
male in Europe believed in his own capacity to make others make him
comfortable Priam Farll was that male.

"I've never been in Putney," he ventured, on a new track.


_Difficulty of Truth-telling_


As she informed him, with an ungrudging particularity, about Putney, and
her life at Putney, there gradually arose in his brain a vision of a
kind of existence such as he had never encountered. Putney had clearly
the advantages of a residential town in a magnificent situation. It lay
on the slope of a hill whose foot was washed by a glorious stream
entitled the Thames, its breast covered with picturesque barges and
ornamental rowing boats; an arched bridge spanned this stream, and you
went over the bridge in milk-white omnibuses to London. Putney had a
street of handsome shops, a purely business street; no one slept there
now because of the noise of motors; at eventide the street glittered in
its own splendours. There were theatre, music-hall, assembly-rooms,
concert hall, market, brewery, library, and an afternoon tea shop
exactly like Regent Street (not that Mrs. Challice cared for their
alleged China tea); also churches and chapels; and Barnes Common if you
walked one way, and Wimbledon Common if you walked another. Mrs.
Challice lived in Werter Road, Werter Road starting conveniently at the
corner of the High Street where the fish-shop was--an establishment