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When I get that study," said Kipps, "I shall do a bit of reading I've long wanted to do. Get the notebook and read it. Examine the window and get the third clue. It is all very well to sit in the sunshine and talk of the house you will have, Umbrella Billiards and another altogether to achieve it. Kipps, not altogether inaudibly. And Kipps, a little pale, blowing a little, not in complete possession of himself, knew that they noticed her and him. For one consequence, it has very few nice little houses, such things do not come for the asking, they are not to be bought with money during ignoble times. They had bought that hat one day when they had gone to see the shops in Bond street. I think I'd like a little bit of a study-not a big one, of course, but one with a desk and book-shelves, like there was in Hughenden. The old Colonel has no harm in him; his scandal blows upon the grandmothers of people that have passed away, and his little improprieties are such as might illustrate a sermon of the present day.

As to abolishing the old Colonel, this too presents its difficulties, for Sir Norman Henry and all the celebrated cocked-hats at home and abroad look upon the Indian Staff Corps as Pygmalion looked on his Venus. It is good to ask him to place his old knees under your hospitable board, and to fill him with wholesome wine, while he decants the mellow stories of an Anglo-India that is speedily dissolving from view. Ere, while you been getting me a sootable 'ouse, blowed if I 'aven't built one! In a little while it was ascertained that the robbers had concealed their plunder in a vacant store in the principal street of Bismarck. Honeymoons and all things come to an end, and you see at last Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Kipps descending upon the Hythe platform-coming to Hythe to find that nice little house-to realise that bright dream of a home they had first talked about in the grounds of the Crystal Palace. All the houses they saw had a common quality for which she could find no word, but for which the proper word is incivility.

You'll find them at Brazos Hall. I don't see what you want a drawin'-room and a dinin' and a kitchen for. So you see our poor, dear Kippses going to and fro, in Hythe, in Sandgate, in Ashford and Canterbury and Deal and Dover-at last even in Folkestone, with "orders to view," pink and green and white and yellow orders to view, and labelled keys in Kipps' hand and frowns and perplexity upon their faces.… Its houses are built on the ground of monstrously rich, shabbily extortionate landowners, by poor, parsimonious, greedy people in a mood of elbowing competition. After all, isn't that what other people are for? To go househunting is to spy out the nakedness of this pretentious world, to see what our civilization amounts to when you take away curtains and flounces and carpets and all the fluster and distraction of people and fittings. I insisted, that if he continued to speak so fast in public, I would be obliged to stand beside him on the platform as interpreter for his hearers, or else take my position in the audience and send him a sign of warning from there.

The price of that hat would take many people's breath away-it cost two guineas! Only now she wears a hat. Kipps wears a grey suit, with a wing-poke collar and a neat, smart tie. Kipps chose it. Kipps paid for it. She had come so far towards a proper conception of Kipps' social position as to admit the prospect of one servant-"but lor'!" she would say, "you'd want a manservant in this 'ouse." When the houses were not too big, then they were almost invariably the product of speculative building, of that multitudinous hasty building for the extravagant multitude of new births that was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century. You do not escape these things for long even by so catastrophic a proceeding as flying to London with a young lady of no wealth and inferior social position. Sid's social democracy had got into her blood perhaps, and anyhow they went about discovering the most remarkable inconsiderateness in the contemporary house.