married some powerful woman like Miss Batchelor, a woman with ideas and
money and character, to say nothing of an inviolable social reputation.
But men like Tyson never do what they ought. Miss Batchelor was clever,
and he hated clever women. So he married Molly Wilcox. Molly Wilcox was
nineteen; she had had no education, and, what was infinitely worse, she
had a vulgar mother. And as Mr. Wilcox might be considered a negligible
quantity, the chances were that she would take after her mother.

The mystery was how Tyson ever came to know these people. Mr. Wilcox was
a student and an invalid; moreover, he was excessively morose. He would
not have called, and even Mrs. Wilcox could hardly have called without
him. Scandal-mongers said that Tyson struck up an acquaintance with the
girl and her mother in a railway carriage somewhere between Drayton and
St. Pancras, and had called on the strength of it. It did great credit to
his imagination that he could see the makings of Mrs. Nevill Tyson in
Molly Wilcox, dressed according to her mother's taste, with that hair of
hers all curling into her eyes in front, and rumpled up anyhow behind.
However, though I daresay his introduction was a little informal and
obscure, there was every reason for the intimacy that followed. The
Wilcoxes were unpopular; so, by this time, was Tyson. In cultivating him
Mrs. Wilcox felt that she was doing something particularly esoteric and
rather daring. She had taken a line. She loved everything that was a
little flagrant, a little out of the common, and a little dubious. To a
lady with these tastes Tyson was a godsend; he more than satisfied her
desire for magnificence and mystery. For economical reasons Mrs. Wilcox's
body was compelled to live with Mr. Wilcox in a cottage in Drayton Parva;
but her soul dwelt continually in a side-street in Bayswater, in a region
haunted by the shabby-refined, the shabby-smart, and the innocently
risky. Mrs. Wilcox, I maintain, was as innocent as the babe unborn. She
believed that not only is this world the best of all possible worlds, but