She murmured, to soften her conscience, 'Poor Mrs.Pettigrew!' And once more Mr.Redworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the maelstrom of a happiness resembling tempest.

He talked, and knew not what he uttered.

To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink was his business, and he performed it.

Oddly, for a man who had no loaded design, marshalling the troops in his active and capacious cranium, he fell upon calculations of his income, present and prospective, while she sat at the table and he stood behind her.

Others were wrangling for places, chairs, plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne: she had them; the lady under his charge to a certainty would have them; so far good; and he had seven hundred pounds per annum--seven hundred and fifty, in a favourable aspect, at a stretch....
'Yes, the pleasantest thing to me after working all day is an opera of Carini's,' she said, in full accord with her taste, 'and Tellio for tenor, certainly.'-- A fair enough sum for a bachelor: four hundred personal income, and a prospect of higher dividends to increase it; three hundred odd from his office, and no immediate prospects of an increase there; no one died there, no elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors could be persuaded to die; they were too tough to think of retiring.