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Rh pleaded the wife, when her attention was directed to long outstanding accounts at Buckland & Joshua's and Senior the jewellers.

Wearied with a long day's round of professional visiting, and attendance at meetings, the long-suffering doctor must needs dress and take his wife and daughters to some cloying scene of festivity, with a suppressed yawn thanking his gracious hostess for "a most enjoyable evening," when at length Hilda and her mother had been induced to depart.

"The whole thing is so false and hollow," he would say. " I despise myself for uttering these conventional lies, and for participating in this make-believe existence. You do not enjoy it," he would protest, "you are always tired. And what is there to show for all your labours? If it were natural, were we in a position to entertain, if you went out as, and where, you really wished to go, I could understand it. But your fashionable life as now lived is, in my opinion, artificial, unintellectual, and a sham throughout."

"I fear, Charles, you lost at whist to-night," his spouse suggested.

"No, I did not. No such relief to monotony. I only played to pass the time."

"It is your absurd dabbling in every form of charity and in all sorts of social schemes that is dragging us down," the good lady urged, as the conversation was continued at a later hour. "What about those men you have sent away? Who, but you, is responsible for their maintenance?"

"I'm not," the husband replied; "I shall do my best. If others will not help, they must return and starve here in town."

The doctor and some friends had indeed despatched