He rose to make it. But his face was set.

As they sat at table she asked him:

“Why did you marry her? She was commoner than yourself. Mrs. Bolton told me about her. She could never understand why you married her.”

He looked at her fixedly.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “The first girl I had, I began with when I was sixteen. She was a schoolmaster’s daughter over at Ollerton, pretty, beautiful really. I was supposed to be a clever sort of young fellow from Sheffield Grammar School, with a bit of French and German, very much up aloft. She was the romantic sort that hated commonness. She egged me on to poetry and reading: in a way, she made a man of me. I read and I thought like a house on fire, for her. And I was a clerk in Butterley Offices, a thin, white-faced fellow fuming with all the things I read. And about everything