Her Faithful Knight — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

6 The Hour and rhe Woman. Great Russell street under an umbrella, thinking out an article he meant to elaborate by the aid of certain vol- umes in the Museum library, beheld none of these social amenities, and decided that'a plainer or more depressed looking lot of people, even for a rainy day, than these students and readers, he had never yet considered.. “What ugly girls! Upon my word, they have need to study the beautiful! It should lead to smashed looking- glasses at home, though.” After seven years spent in the chief newspaper office of a northern manufacturing town, Aylmer Read had seized the chance of a position in London, and rather hoped on his return thither to find every provincial goose ex- changed for a metropolitan swan. Born and reared in London, he did not hope to see the streets paved with gold, but what he did eagerly anticipate was a larger in- tellectual life, greater possibilities for cultured social in- tercourse, and, chiefly, for acquaintanceship with women in his own rank of life, who combined education with grace and beauty. Up in Clofield his brother journalists had mated con- tentedly with their landladies’ daughters, with barmaids, or with chance young women encountered on their year- ly outings; and these ladies had, according to their sev- eral lights, cooked and mended and managed for them, provided them with families, nagged at them, gossipped about them, cordially admired their abilities and deplored their increasing love for strong drinks, and made wretched the lives of sundry overworked and underfed “helps” in the kitchen and the nursery. With such a helpmeet, Aylmer Read, at seven-and- twenty, with a digestion which so far defied bad cookery, could by no means be satisfied. Although he lived in the latter end of the nineteenth century, he cherished feelings of romance and chivalry. Outwardly calm, matter of Eomichooks (S@)