These were, very nearly, the first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together, interchanged.

Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the uneasiness that he felt with children.

Little girls (who certainly looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly; moreover, Mrs.Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright and easy in any society.

"Poor old Munty," she would say to her friends, "it's not all his fault----" It was, as a fact, very largely hers.

He had never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom.