Put him, for instance, beside Mr.Sikleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, and where was he?
Nowhere.

He couldn't even understand what Mr.Snoop was saying.

And when Mr.Snoop would stand on the hearth-rug with a cup of tea balanced in his hand, and discuss whether sex was or was not the dominant note in Botticelli, Mrs.Rasselyer-Brown would be skulking in a corner in his ill-fitting dress suit.

His wife would often catch with an agonized ear such scraps of talk as, "When I was first in the coal and wood business," or, "It's a coal that burns quicker than egg, but it hasn't the heating power of nut," or even in a low undertone the words, "If you're feeling _dry_ while he's reading--" And this at a time when everybody in the room ought to have been listening to Mr.Snoop.
Nor was even this the whole burden of Mrs.Rasselyer-Brown.

There was another part of it which was perhaps more _real_, though Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown herself never put it into words.