Nevertheless, this very successful man of the world of the Five Towns,
having been born on the 27th of May 1867, had reached the age of
forty-three and a half years!
"I must be getting older," he reflected.
He was right. He was still young, as every man of forty-three will
agree, but he was getting older. A few years ago a windfall of three
hundred and forty-one pounds would not have been followed by morbid
self-analysis; it would have been followed by unreasoning, instinctive
elation, which elation would have endured at least twelve hours.
As he disappeared within the reddish garden wall which sheltered
his abode from the publicity of Trafalgar Road, he half hoped to see
Nellie waiting for him on the famous marble step of the porch, for the
woman had long, long since invented a way of scouting for his advent
from the small window in the bathroom. But there was nobody on the
marble step. His melancholy increased. At the mid-day meal he had
complained of neuralgia, and hence this was an evening upon which he
might fairly have expected to see sympathy charmingly attired in the
porch. It is true that the neuralgia had completely gone. "Still," he
said to himself with justifiable sardonic gloom, "how does she know my
neuralgia's gone? She doesn't know."
Having opened the front-door (with the thinnest, neatest latch-key
in the Five Towns), he entered his home and stumbled slightly over a
brush that was lying against the sunk door-mat.
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