To be the husband of a celebrated¹ woman is not an unmixed blessing². Mr. Peter Octagon found it to be so, when he married Mrs. Saxon, the widow of an eminent³ Q.C. She was a fine Junoesque tragic⁴ woman, who modelled herself on the portraits of the late Mrs. Siddons. Peter, on the contrary, was a small, meek⁵, light-haired, short-sighted man, who had never done anything in his unromantic life, save accumulate a fortune as a law-stationer. For many years he lived in single blessedness, but when he retired⁶ with an assured income of three thousand a year, he thought he would marry. He had no relatives, having been brought up in a Foundling Hospital, and consequently, found life rather lonely in his fine Kensington house. He really did not care about living in such a mansion⁷, and had purchased the property as a speculation⁸, intending to sell it at a profit. But having fallen in with Mrs. Saxon, then a hard-up widow, she not only induced him to marry her, but, when married, she insisted that the house should be retained, so that she could dispense⁹ hospitality to a literary circle.

Mrs. Octagon was very literary. She had published several novels under the nom-deplume of “Rowena.” She had produced a volume of poems; she had written a play which had been produced at a matinee; and finally her pamphlets on political questions stamped her, in the opinion of her immediate¹⁰ circle, as a William Pitt in petticoats. She looked upon herself as the George Eliot of the twentieth century, and dated events from the time of her first success. “That happened before I became famous,” she would say. “No, it was after I took the public by storm.” And her immediate circle, who appreciated her cakes and ale, would agree with everything she said. The Kensington house was called “The

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