IT added to the vagueness due to his growing habit of inattention to anything that did not immediately concern him, that there was a real element of mystery about the occupations of nearly all his fellow-boarders during the middle part of the day. It never dawned upon Edward Albert from first to last that Mr Harold Thump was living almost entirely on the earnings of his wife. The fiction that she was engaged in some literary work of an exalted sort veiled the fact that she managed an ill-ventilated dressmaking workroom in Shaftesbury Avenue with considerable harshness and success. Harold Thump sat about in the parks in fine weather or repaired to Selfridge’s extremely hospitable new premises in Oxford Street when it was cold or wet, or he watched the world go by at some railway station, alert for any conversation that might lead to a lesson in voice production or an invitation to a sing-song. Or if he was in a state of financial elation, he would drift to the Hippodrome corner, and there exchange drinks and reminiscences of success, with various kindred spirits who gathered there, the “Boys”, the ripe characters, the good Old Guard. That way he sometimes heard of opportunities, though they were usually opportunities that fled too quickly to be grasped. But Edward Albert imagined a different picture altogether of his off-stage hours. He thought of a great classroom and Harold leading a large resonant chorus. Harold: “Oorl the Woorrld’s a Stay-je.”

Chorus in thunderous unison: “Oorl the Woorrld’s a Stay-je.”

It did not dawn upon Edward Albert that the young lady from Harley Street, Miss Pooley, whose Christian name was part of her personal reserve, was not a distinguished medical practitioner but the young lady who made appointments for an oculist and stood by helpfully to hand him the various lights, mirrors, spectacle frames, needed in his practice, or that bitter old Mr Blake, who displayed so vivid a hatred and contempt for every prominent scientific reputation, because, it seemed, they appropriated the work that far better men did for them, was in fact a decaying laboratory assistant from University College.

Nor did our hero ever realise that the quiet genteel widow who was constantly referring to “my friend Lady Tweedman”— that Lady Tweedman who “used to say” so many authoritative and quenching things about social behaviour — disappeared so suddenly from Doober’s because, after repeated warnings, she had been caught red-handed shoplifting. The magistrate made an example of her. He swept Lady Tweedman aside. “If this Lady Twiddlum (oh, Tweedman, did you say? Tweedman) can answer for your character, why isn’t she here to do so?”

Edward Albert heard Mrs Doober say “Kleptomania” to Miss Pooley, but it meant nothing to him. Suddenly the widow was ............