There was a pause, in which every muscle of the man's body, and
especially the facial muscles, and every secret fibre of his soul,
perceptibly stiffened. And then Omicron answered, curtly, rebuttingly,
reprovingly, snappishly, finishingly:

"I don't know."

And took up his newspaper, whose fragile crackling wall defended him
from attack every bit as well as a screen of twelve-inch
armour-plating.

The subject was dropped.

It had endured about ten seconds. But those ten seconds marked an
epoch in Omicron's career as a husband--and he knew it not. He knew it
not, but the whole of his conjugal future had hung evenly in the
balance during those ten seconds, and then slid slightly but
definitely--to the wrong side.

Of course, there was more in the affair than appeared on the surface.
At dinner the otherwise excellent leg of mutton had proved on cutting
to be most noticeably underdone. Now, it is a monstrous shame that
first-class mutton should be wasted through inefficient cookery; with
third-class mutton the crime might have been deemed less awful.
Moreover, four days previously another excellent dish had been
rendered unfit for masculine consumption by precisely the same
inefficiency or gross negligence, or whatever one likes to call it.
Nor was that all. The coffee had been thin, feeble, uninteresting. The
feminine excuse for this last diabolic iniquity had been that the