him no difficulties, while his pleasures brought him no pains. His
morality was bounded by the doctor on the one side, and the
magistrate on the other. Careful never to outrage the decrees of
either, he was at forty-five still healthy, though stout; and had
achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune while avoiding
all risk of Holloway. He and his wife, Edith (nee Eppington), were
as ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any dramatist
seeking material for a problem play. As they stood before the
altar on their wedding morn, they might have been taken as
symbolising satyr and saint. More than twenty years his junior,
beautiful with the beauty of a Raphael's Madonna, his every touch
of her seemed a sacrilege. Yet once in his life Mr. Blake played
the part of a great gentleman; Mrs. Blake, on the same occasion,
contenting herself with a singularly mean role--mean even for a
woman in love.

The affair, of course, had been a marriage of convenience. Blake,
to do him justice, had made no pretence to anything beyond
admiration and regard. Few things grow monotonous sooner than
irregularity. He would tickle his jaded palate with
respectability, and try for a change the companionship of a good
woman. The girl's face drew him, as the moonlight holds a man who,
bored by the noise, turns from a heated room to press his forehead
to the window-pane. Accustomed to bid for what he wanted, he
offered his price. The Eppington family was poor and numerous.
The girl, bred up to the false notions of duty inculcated by a
narrow conventionality, and, feminine like, half in love with
martyrdom for its own sake, let her father bargain for a higher
price, and then sold herself.