As a bookman Guy Berridge stood alone.
"There's nothing like them for furnishing a house," said he; "and nowadays they're so cheap. There's that new series of Victorian Classics—one-and-tenpence-halfpenny! And those Eighteenth Century Masterpieces—I don't know when I shall get time to read them, but they're worth the money for the binding alone—especially with everything peculiar taken out!"
Peculiar was a family epithet of the widest possible significance. It was peculiar of Guy, in the eyes of the other three, to be in such a hurry to leave their comfortable home for one of his own on a necessarily much smaller scale. Miss Hemming, the future Mrs. Guy, was by no means deficient in peculiarity from his people's point of view. She affected flowing fabrics of peculiar shades, and she had still more peculiar ideas of furnishing. On Saturday afternoons she would drag poor Guy into all the second-hand furniture shops in the neighbourhood—not even to save money, as Mrs. Berridge complained to her more intimate friends—but just to be peculiar. It seemed like a judgment when Guy fell so ill with influenza, obviously contracted in one of those highly peculiar shops, that he had to mortgage his summer holiday by going away for a complete change early in the New Year.
He went to country cousins of the suburban Hemmings; his own Miss Hemming went with him, and it was on their return that a difference was first noticed in the young couple. They no longer looked radiant together, much less when apart. The good young accountant would pass my window with a quite tragic face. And one morning, when we met outside, he told me that he had not slept a wink.
That evening I went to smoke a pipe with Uvo Delavoye, who happened to have brought me into these people's ken. And we were actually talking about Guy Berridge and his affairs when the maid showed him up into Uvo's room.
I never saw a man look quite so wretched. The mild face seemed to cower behind the truculent moustache; the eyes, bright and bloodshot, winced when one met them. I got up to go, feeling instinctively that he had come to confide in Uvo. But Berridge read me as quickly as I read him.
"Don't you go on my account," said he gloomily. "I've nothing to tell Delavoye that I can't tell you, especially after giving myself away to you once already to-day. I daresay three heads will be better than two, and I know I can trust you both."
"Is anything wrong?" asked Uvo, when preliminary solicitations had reminded me that his visitor neither smoked nor drank.
"Everything!" was the reply.
"Not with your engagement, I hope?"