was always trying to harrow her by the suggestion. And Frances only
laughed at him and told him that he was a silly old thing, and that he
needn't think he was going to get round her that way.

There was no other way open for Anthony; unless he were to go bankrupt
or get pneumonia or peritonitis. Frances would have been the first to
acknowledge that illness or misfortune constituted a claim. And the only
things he ever did get were loud, explosive colds in his head which made
him a mark for derision. His business was so sound that not even a
revolution or a European war could shake it. And his appearance was
incompatible with his pretensions to pathos.

It would have paid him better to have been small and weedy, or
lamentably fat, or to have had a bald place coming, or crow's feet
pointing to grey hairs; for then there might have been a chance for him.
But Anthony's body was well made, slender and tall. He had blue eyes and
black-brown hair, and the look of an amiable hawk, alert, fiercely
benevolent. Frances couldn't see any pathos in the kind of figure she
happened to admire most, the only kind she would have tolerated in a
husband. And if she _had_ seen any pathos in it she wouldn't have
married it. Pathos, she said, was all very well in a father, or a
brother, or a friend, but in choosing a husband you had to think of your
children; and she had wanted boys that would look like Michael and
Nicholas and John.

"Don't you mean," Anthony had said, "boys that will look like me?"

"I mean," she had answered, "exactly what I say. You needn't be so
arrogant."