these reflections have surged up in my brain as i contemplate the recent case of my acquaintance, mr. omicron, and they are preliminary to a study of that interesting case. scarce a week ago omicron was sitting in the omicron drawing-room alone with mrs. omicron. it was an average omicron evening. omicron is aged thirty-two. he is neither successful nor unsuccessful, and no human perspicacity can say whether twenty years hence he will be successful or unsuccessful. but anybody can see that he is already on the way to be a plain, well-balanced man. somewhat earlier than usual he is losing the fanciful capricious qualities and settling down into the stiff backbone of the nation.

conversation was not abundant.

said mrs. omicron suddenly, with an ingratiating accent:

“what about that ring that i was to have?”

there was a pause, in which every muscle of the man’s body, and especially the facial muscles, and every secret fibre of his soul, perceptibly stiffened. and then omicron answered, curtly, rebuttingly, reprovingly, snappishly, finishingly:

“i don’t know.”

and took up his newspaper, whose fragile crackling wall defended him from attack every bit as well as a screen of twelve-inch armour-plating.

the subject was dropped.

it had endured about ten seconds. but those ten seconds marked an epoch in omicron’s career as a husband—and he knew it not. he knew it not, but the whole of his conjugal future had hung evenly in the balance during those ten seconds, and then slid slightly but definitely—to the wrong side.

of course, there was more in the affair than appeared on the surface. at dinner the otherwise excellent leg of mutton had proved on cutting to be most noticeably underdone. now, it is a monstrous shame that first-class mutton should be wasted through inefficient cookery; with third-class mutton the crime might have been deemed less awful. moreover, four days previously another excellent dish had been rendered unfit for masculine consumption by precisely the same inefficiency or gross negligence, or whatever one likes to call it. nor was that all. the coffee had been thin, feeble, uninteresting. the feminine excuse for this last diabolic iniquity had been that the kitchen at the last moment had discovered itself to be short of coffee. an entirely commonplace episode! yes, but it is out of commonplace episodes that martyrs are made, and omicron had been made a martyr. he, if none else, was fully aware that evening that he was a martyr. and the woman had selected just that evening to raise the question of rings, gauds, futile ornamentations! he had said little. but he had stood for the universal husband, and in mrs. omicron he saw the universal wife.