A CALL


The next moment the two fluffy women had decided, without in the least
consulting James, that they would ascend to Helen's bedroom to look at a
hat which, James was surprised to learn, Helen had seen in Brunt's
window that morning and had bought on the spot. No wonder she had been
in a hurry to go marketing; no wonder she had spent "some" of his
ten-pound note! He had seen hats in Brunt's marked as high as two
guineas; but he had not dreamt that such hats would ever enter his
house. While he had been labouring, collecting his rents and arranging
for repairs, throughout the length and the breadth of Bursley and
Turnhill, she, under pretence of marketing, had been flinging away
ten-pound notes at Brunt's. The whole business was fantastic, simply and
madly fantastic; so fantastic that he had not yet quite grasped the
reality of it! The whole business was unheard of. He saw, with all the
clearness of his masculine intellect, that it must cease. The force with
which he decided within himself that it must cease--and
instanter!--bordered upon the hysterical. As he had said, plaintively,
he was an oldish man. His habits, his manners, and his notions,
especially his notions about money, were fixed and set like plaster of
Paris in a mould. Helen's conduct was nothing less than dangerous. It
might bring him to a sudden death from heart disease. Happily, he had
had a very good week indeed with his rents. He trotted about all day on
Mondays and on Tuesday mornings, gathering his rents, and on Tuesday
afternoons he usually experienced the assuaged content of an alligator
after the weekly meal. Otherwise there was no knowing what might not
have been the disastrous consequences of Helen's barefaced robbery and
of her unscrupulous, unrepentant defence of that robbery. For days and