"And the only thing that struck him as being at all in his way was his
wife. In her cap and apron, or her Sunday print she had always looked as
dainty and fetching a little piece of goods as a man could wish to be
seen out with. Dressed according to the advice of his new-found friends,
of course she looked like nothing else so much as a barn-yard chicken in
turkey-cock's feathers. He was shocked to find that her size in gloves
was seven-and-a-quarter, and in boots something over four, and that sort
of thing naturally irritates a woman more even than finding fault with
her immortal soul. I guess for about a year he made her life pretty well
a burden for her, trying to bring her up to the standard of the Saturday-
to-Monday-at-Brighton set with which he had surrounded himself, or which,
to speak more correctly, had got round him. She'd a precious sight more
gumption than he had ever possessed, and if he had listened to her
instead of insisting upon her listening to him it would have been better
for him. But there are some men who think that if you have a taste for
champagne and the ballet that proves you are intended by nature for a
nob, and he was one of them; and any common-sense suggestion of hers only
convinced him of her natural unfitness for an exalted station.

"He grumbled at her accent, which, seeing that his own was acquired in
Lime-house and finished off in the Minories, was just the sort of thing a
fool would do. And he insisted on her reading all the society novels as
they came out--you know the sort I mean,--where everybody snaps everybody
else's head off, and all the proverbs are upside down; people leave them
about the hotels when they've done with them, and one gets into the habit
of dipping into them when one's nothing better to do. His hope was that
she might, with pains, get to talk like these books. That was his ideal.

"She did her best, but of course the more she got away from herself the
more absurd she became; and the rubbish and worse that he had about him