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As he was drying his hands, Gosling heard the front door slam and his daughters’ voices in the passage below, followed by a shrill exhortation from the kitchen: “Now, gels, ’urry up, dinner’s all ready and your father’s waitin’!”

Gosling trotted downstairs and received the usual salute from his two girls. He noted that they were a shade more effusive than usual. “Want more money for fal-lals,” was his inward comment. They were always wanting money for “fal-lals.”

He adopted his usual line of defence through dinner and constantly brought the subject of conversation back to the need for a reduction of expenses. He did not see Blanche wink at Millie across the table, during these strategic exercises; nor catch the glance of understanding which passed between the girls and their mother. So, as his dinner comforted and cheered him, Gosling began to relax into his usual facetiousness; incredibly believing, despite the invariable precedents of his family history, that his daughters had been convinced of the hopelessness of approaching him for money that evening.

The credulous creature even allowed them to make their opening, and then assisted them to a statement of their petition.

They were talking of a friend’s engagement to be married, and Gosling with an obtuseness he never displayed in business remarked, “Wish my gels ’ud get married.”

“Talking about us, father?” asked Blanche.

“Well, you’re the only gels I’ve got—as I know of,” said Gosling.

“Well, how can you expect us to get married when we haven’t got a decent thing to put on?” returned Blanche.

Gosling realized his danger too late. “Pooh! That don’t make any difference,” he said hastily, adopting a thoroughly unsound line of defence; “I never noticed what your mother was wearing when I courted ’er.”

“Dessay you didn’t,” replied Millie, “I dessay most fellows couldn’t tell you what a girl was wearing, but it makes just all the difference for all that.”

“Of course it does,” said Blanche. “A girl’s got no chance these days unless she can look smart. No fellow’s going to marry a dowdy.”

“It does make a big difference, there’s no denyin’,” put in Mrs Gosling, as though she was being convinced against her will.

“And now the sales are just beginning——”

Poor Gosling knew the game was up. They had made no direct attack upon his pocket, yet; but they would not relax their grip of this fascinating subject till they had achieved their object. Blanche was saying that she was ashamed to be seen anywhere; and procrastination would be met at once by the argument—how well he knew it—based on the premise that if you didn’t buy at sale-time, you had to pay twice as much later.

It was quite useless for Gosling to fidget, throw himself back in his chair, frown, shake his head, and look horribly determined; the course of progress was unalterable from the direct attack: “Do you like to see us going about in rags, father?” through the stage of “Well, well, ’ow much do you want? I simply can’t afford——” and the ensuing haggles down to the despairing sigh as the original minimum demanded—in this case no less than five pounds—was forlornly conceded, and clinched by Blanche’s, “We must have it before the end of the week, dad, the sales begin on Monday.”

At the end of it all, he received what compensation they had to offer him; hugs and kisses, offers to do all sorts of impossible things, assistance in getting his armchair into precisely the right position, and him into the chair, and the table cleared and the lamp in just the right place for him to read his half-penny evening paper which was fetched for him from the pocket of his overcoat. And, finally, the crux of Gosling’s whole position, a general air of complacency, good-temper and comfort.

Gosling was an easy-going man, he hated rows.

“Mind you, you two,” he remarked with a return to facetiousness as he settled himself with his carpet slippers spread out to the fire—“mind you, I look on this money as an investment. You two gels got to get married; and quick or I shall be in the bankrup’cy Court. Don’t you forget as these ‘fal-lals’ is bought for a purpose.”

“Oh, don’t be so horrid, father,” said Blanche, with a change of front; “it sounds as if we were setting traps for men.”

“Well, ain’t you?” asked Gosling. “You said just now——”

“Not like that,” interrupted Blanche. “It’s very different just wanting to look nice. Personally, I’m in no ’urry to get married, thank you.”

“You wait till Mr Right comes along,” put in Mrs Gosling, and then turned the conversation by saying: “Well, father, what’s the news this evening?”

“Nothin’ excitin’,” replied Gosling. “Seems this new plague’s spreadin’ in China.”

“They’re always inventin’ new diseases, nowadays, or callin’ old ones by new names,” said Mrs Gosling. The two girls were busy with a sheet of note-paper and a stump of pencil that seemed to require frequent lubrication; they were making calculations.

“This one’s quite new, seemingly,” returned Gosling. “It’s only the men as get it.”

“No need for us to worry, then,” put in Millie, more as a duty, some slight return for benefits promised, than because she took any interest in the subject. Blanche was absorbed; her unseeing gaze was fixed on the mantelpiece and ever and again she removed the point of the pencil from her mouth and wrote feverishly.

“Oh, ain’t there?” replied Gosling. He turned his head in order to argue from so strong a position. “And where’d you be, and all the rest of the women, if you ’adn’t got no men to look after you?”

“I expect we could get along pretty well, if we had to,” said Millie.

Gosling winked at his wife, and indicated by an upward movement of his chin that he was astounded at such innocence. “Who’d buy your ‘fal-lals’ for you, I should like to know?” he asked.

“We’d have to earn money for ourselves,” said Millie.

“Ah! I’d like to see you or Blanche takin’ over my job,” replied her father. “Why, I’ll lay there’s ’alf a dozen mistakes in the figurin’ she’s doing at the present moment. Let me see!”

Blanche descended suddenly from visions of Paradise, and put her hand over the sheet of note-paper. “You can’t, father,” she said.

Gosling looked sly. “Indeed?” he said, with simulated surprise. “And why not? Ain’t I to be allowed to judge of the nature of the investment I’m goin’ in for? I might give you an ’int or two from the gentleman’s point of view.”

Blanche shook her head. “I haven’t added it up yet,” she said.

Gosling did not press the point; he returned to his original position. “I dunno where you ladies ’ud be if you ’adn’t no gentlemen to look after you.”

Mrs Gosling smirked. “We’ll ’ope it won’t come to that,” she said. “China’s a long way off.”

“Appears as there’s been one case in Russia, though,” remarked Gosling. He saw that he had rather a good thing in this threat of male extermination, a pleasant, harmless threat to hold over his feminine dependents; a means to emphasize the facts of masculine superiority and of the absolute necessity for masculine intelligence; facts that were not sufficiently well realized in Wisteria Grove, at times.

Mrs Gosling yawned surreptitiously. She was doing her best to be pleasant, but the subject bored her. She was a practical woman who worked hard all day to keep her house clean, and received very feeble assistance from the daughters for whom her one ambition was an establishment conducted on lines precisely similar to her own.

Millie and Blanche had returned to their calculations and were completely absorbed.

“In Russia? Just fancy,” commented Mrs Gosling.

“In Moscow,” said Gosling, studying his Evening News. “’E was an official on the trans-Siberian Railway. ‘As soon as the disease was identified as a case of the new plague,’” read Gosling, “‘the patient was at once removed to the infectious hospital and strictly isolated. He died within two hours of his admission. Stringent measures are being taken to prevent the infection from spreading.’”

“Was ’e a married man?” asked Mrs Gosling.

“Doesn’t say,” replied her husband. “But the point is that if it once gets to Europe, who knows where it’ll stop?”

“They’ll see to that, you may be sure,” said Mrs Gosling, with a beautiful faith in the scientific resources of civilization. “It said somethin’ about that in the bit you’ve just read.”

Gosling was not to be done out of his argument. “Very like,” he said. “But now, just supposin’ as this ’ere plague did spread to London, and ’alf the men couldn’t go to work; where d’you fancy you’d be?”

Mrs Gosling was unable to grasp the intricacies of this abstraction. “Well, of course, every one knows as we couldn’t get on without the men,” she said.

“Ah! well there you are, got it in once,” said Gosling. “And don’t you gels forget it,” he added turning to his daughters.

Millie only giggled, but Blanche said, “All right, dad, we won’t.”

The girls returned to their calculations; they had arrived at the stage of cutting out all those items which were not “absolutely necessary.” Five pounds had proved a miserably inadequate sum on paper.

Gosling returned to his Evening News, which presently slipped gently from his hand to the floor. Mrs Gosling looked up from her sewing and put a finger on her lips. The voices of Blanche and Millie were subdued to sibilant whisperings.

Gosling had forgotten his economic problems, and his daring abstractions concerning a world despoiled of male activity, especially of that essential activity, as he figured it, the making of money—the wage-earner was enjoying his after-dinner nap, hedged about, protected and cared for by his womankind.

There may have been a quarter of a million wage-earners in Greater London at that moment, who, however much they differed from Gosling on such minor questions as Tariff Reform or the capabilities of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, would have agreed with him as a matter of course, on the essentials he had discussed that evening.