“There’s something in connection with your society,” went on Louisa, encouraged, “that you might arrange if you’d got any gumption.”
“Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I have.”
“It’s this. When one of your single chaps gets engaged let him begin paying into a wedding fund. You’ve got your strike funds and what not, but you ain’t got no wedding fund.”
“We haven’t any wedding fund,” corrected Erb.
“Oh, never mind about grammar,” said his young sister impetuously, “I’m talking sense. Let them all pay a bob or so a week, and the one that draws a good number gets his ten pound and goes off and gets married like a shot. See what an interest it’d make the girls take in your society. See how it’d make your young carmen sought after. See how fine it’d be for them to start life on their own, instead of having to go on paying so much a week for ’ire to the furniture shops. See how—”
“A reg’lar little orator,” said Erb approvingly. “It must run in the blood, I think. Besides, there’s an idea in what you say.”
“I never speak,” said his sister with confidence, “without I say something.” She paused for a moment. “I suppose, Erb, that—that with all this money coming in, you’ll begin to think about getting—”
He put his knife and fork down and rose from his chair.
The marriage club was only one of the new features that Erb introduced to the society, but it was the one which had a tinge of melancholy, in that it appeared to him that he was almost alone in not having in hand a successful affair of the heart. Lady Frances came frequently to Bermondsey, where she threw herself with great earnestness into the excellent work of providing amusing hours for children—children who had never been taught games, and knew no other sport than that of imperilling their little lives in the street. Erb, being seen with her one evening as she returned from a Board School, there ensued at the next committee meeting considerable badinage of a lumbering type; Payne declared that Erb should join the wedding club in order that the happy pair should be in a position to set up a house in Portman Square together; Spanswick remarked with less of good temper, that some people’s heads were getting too big for their hats; whilst other members, ever ready to take part in the fine old London sport of chipping, offered gibes. Erb retorted with his usual readiness, and laughed at the suggestion; but afterwards found himself fearing whether Lady Frances was, in point of fact, lavishing upon him a hopeless affection. He had almost persuaded himself to admit that this was the case, when his sister Alice made one of her condescending calls at Page’s Walk and gave, with other information, the fact that the sweetheart of Lady Frances, a lieutenant, the Honourable Somebody, had some time since been ordered away on a mission to the North-West Coast of Africa; her young ladyship was, by this desperate interest in the juveniles of Bermondsey, endeavouring to distract her mind from thoughts of her absent lover. Erb breathed again and gave assistance in managing the most trying boys at the “Happy Evenings.” One night, as he performed the duty of seeing Lady Frances through the dimly-lighted streets to Spa Road Station, they met Rosalind and her father. Rosalind flushed hotly, and Erb wondered why. He demanded of her the reason at the next elocution lesson, and Rosalind said calmly, that it was because at that moment she had given her second-best ankle a twist.
Lady Frances brought to Erb an invitation that flattered him. Her uncle, of Queen Anne’s Mansions, a man in most of the money-making schemes of London, but one never anxious to obtrude his own name or his own personality, felt desirous of starting a movement for (to give the full Christian names) “The Anglicising of Foreign Manufactures.”