.

TO THE WINNING SIDE.
Of the acquaintances Yule had retained from his earlier years several were in the well-defined category of men with unpresentable wives.

There was Hinks, for instance, whom, though in anger he spoke of him as a bore, Alfred held in some genuine regard.

Hinks made perhaps a hundred a year out of a kind of writing which only certain publishers can get rid of and of this income he spent about a third on books.

His wife was the daughter of a laundress, in whose house he had lodged thirty years ago, when new to London but already long-acquainted with hunger; they lived in complete harmony, but Mrs Hinks, who was four years the elder, still spoke the laundress tongue, unmitigated and immitigable.