"But suppose when we get to this joint it looks dead easy?"
"Ah! Well then, I'm not saying. All I'm against is risks. If something's handed to you on a plate, naturally no one wouldn't ever want to let it get past them."
And with this eminently sound commercial maxim Mr. Molloy reached for his pyjamas and prepared for bed. Something attempted, something done, had earned, he felt, a night's repose.
CHAPTER V
I
Some years before the date of the events narrated in this story, at the time when there was all that trouble between the aristocratic householders of Riverside Row and the humbler dwellers in Budd Street (arising, if you remember, from the practice of the latter of washing their more intimate articles of underclothing and hanging them to dry in back gardens into which their exclusive neighbours were compelled to gaze every time they looked out of windows), the vicar of the parish, the Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, always a happy phrase-maker, wound up his address at the annual village sports of Rudge with an impressive appeal to the good feeling of those concerned.
"We must not," said the Reverend Alistair, "consider ourselves as belonging to this section of Rudge-in-the-Vale or to that section of Rudge-in-the-Vale. Let us get together. Let us recollect that we are all fellow-members of one united community. Rudge must be looked on as a whole. And what a whole it is!"
With the concluding words of this peroration Pat Wyvern, by the time she had been home a little under a week, found herself in hearty agreement. Walking with her father along High Street on the sixth morning, she had to confess herself disappointed with Rudge.
There are times in everyone's experience when Life, after running merrily for a while through pleasant places, seems suddenly to strike a dull and depressing patch of road: and this was what was happening now to Pat. The sense, which had come to her so strongly in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street, of being in a world unworthy of her—a world cold and unsympathetic and full of an inferior grade of human being, had deepened. Her home-coming, she had now definitely decided, was not a success.