"Happy ending this time?"
"I don't quite see it, to be consistent—no."
"You must manage it. They like happy endings, consistent or not."
"Damn it, I mean to be true! I won't sell my birthright for a third edition! I shall work like blazes, and we shall live quite quietly somewhere in a little house——"
"That's impossible," said Turquand. "You may live in a little house, or you may live quietly, but you can't do both things at the same time."
"In the suburbs—in Streatham, probably. Her people live in Streatham, and of course she would like to be near them."
"And you will have a general servant, eh, with large and fiery hands—like Cornelia downstairs? Only she'll look worse than Cornelia, because your wife will dress her up in muslins and streamers, and try to disguise the generality. If you work in the front of your pretty little house, your nervous system 'll be shattered by the shrieks of your neighbours' children swinging on the gates—forty-pound-a-year houses in the suburbs are infested with children; nothing seems to exterminate them, and the inevitable gates groan like souls in hell—and if you choose the back, you'll be assisted by the arrival of the joint, and the vegetables, and the slap of the milk-cans, and Cornelia the Second's altercations with the errand-boys. A general servant with a tin pail alone is warranted to make herself heard for eleven hundred and sixty yards."
"Life hasn't made an optimist of you," observed Kent, less cheerfully, "that you clack about 'happy endings'!"
"The optimist is like the poet—he's born, he isn't made. Speaking of life, I suppose you'll assure yours when you marry?"
"Yes," said Kent meditatively; "yes, that's a good idea. I shall.... But your suggestions are none of them too exhilarating," he added; "let's go to dinner!"