"For one pound, eighteen, and sixpence, rent."
"But, Charlie, what is the good of writing uncomfortable stories, that have no pious object? I can understand why Sunday-school tales are dismal."
"My dear May, the public won't have anything but groans and tears. If you can manage yells for them, all the better. Gladiators don't fight now in the arena. Gentle creatures like you, darling, have no chance of voting violent death to a man by holding down your thumbs in the Colosseum. The modern novel is the portable arena of to-day; and gentle darlings like you, May, must be permitted to view the death-agony of men and women, or you would not patronise the libraries."
"Charlie, if you dare to say any more such horrible untruths, I'll go down to the kitchen, put on an apron, and make the pastry for to-morrow."
"If you do that, I'll go down and eat up all the nasty indigestible dough; and then what will you say at the inquest?"
"Take your arm away, sir; I won't stay here another minute. You have, I think, made up your mind to be disagreeable."
"But you are holding me, and I can't stir."
"And I mean to hold you if you will not sit still while I read the chapter."
"Oh dear, you are a horrible tease! There, let me go; I promise not to run away."
The Duke of Long Acre and Marion Durrant, his sweetheart, were seated in one of the smallest conservatories in London. This conservatory was situated at the back of Miss Traynor's house in Knightsbridge. The house and all that it contained, with the exception of Marion's aunt, the owner, were small. Two people could not possibly walk abreast in the hall, nor up the stairs. It was a saying of the Duke's that one of those days he should get wedged in that hall, and would have to be extracted from it by violent means. There was a tiny front drawing-room and a tiny back drawing-room, and between them a pair of folding-doors which always stood open. At the rear of the back drawing-room was the little conservatory in which Marion and the Duke were seated. The conservatory was as wide as the room, and three feet deep. Owing to shelves at the ends and sides for flowerpots, the absolute dimensions of the place were much reduced, and it was impossible for two people to sit at the same side; so when the Duke held Marion he was standing beside her. He had risen from his chair opposite her a few minutes before. The conservatory was separated from the back drawing-room by a glass door opening into the room. At the back of the conservatory was a glass door yielding outwards on a little wooden landing, which, by means of a flight of wooden steps, communicated with the very small garden below.