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A Man Of Habit
by
“Well, I like that claret, and it does me good. I come in sometimes dead beat. I drink a couple of glasses, and I’m a new man. I took to it in the first instance for the same reason that I took to the cigars–it was cheap. I have it sent over direct from Geneva, and it costs me six shillings a dozen. How they do it I don’t know. I don’t want to know. As you may remember, it’s fairly heady and there’s body in it.
“I knew one man,” he continued, “who had a regular Mrs. Caudle of a wife. All day long she talked to him, or at him, or of him, and at night he fell asleep to the rising and falling rhythm of what she thought about him. At last she died, and his friends congratulated him, telling him that now he would enjoy peace. But it was the peace of the desert, and the man did not enjoy it. For two-and-twenty years her voice had filled the house, penetrated through the conservatory, and floated in faint shrilly waves of sound round the garden, and out into the road beyond. The silence now pervading everywhere frightened and disturbed him. The place was no longer home to him. He missed the breezy morning insult, the long winter evening’s reproaches beside the flickering fire. At night he could not sleep. For hours he would lie tossing restlessly, his ears aching for the accustomed soothing flow of invective.
“‘Ah!’ he would cry bitterly to himself, ‘it is the old story, we never know the value of a thing until we have lost it.’
“He grew ill. The doctors dosed him with sleeping draughts in vain. At last they told him bluntly that his life depended upon his finding another wife, able and willing to nag him to sleep.
“There were plenty of wives of the type he wanted in the neighbourhood, but the unmarried women were, of necessity, inexperienced, and his health was such that he could not afford the time to train them.
“Fortunately, just as despair was about to take possession of him, a man died in the next parish, literally talked to death, the gossip said, by his wife. He obtained an introduction, and called upon her the day after the funeral. She was a cantankerous old woman, and the wooing was a harassing affair, but his heart was in his work, and before six months were gone he had won her for his own.
“She proved, however, but a poor substitute. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. She had neither that command of language nor of wind that had distinguished her rival. From his favourite seat at the bottom of the garden he could not hear her at all, so he had his chair brought up into the conservatory. It was all right for him there so long as she continued to abuse him; but every now and again, just as he was getting comfortably settled down with his pipe and his newspaper, she would suddenly stop.
“He would drop his paper and sit listening, with a troubled, anxious expression.
“‘Are you there, dear?’ he would call out after a while.
“‘Yes, I’m here. Where do you think I am you old fool?’ she would gasp back in an exhausted voice.
“His face would brighten at the sound of her words. ‘Go on, dear,’ he would answer. ‘I’m listening. I like to hear you talk.’
“But the poor woman was utterly pumped out, and had not so much as a snort left.
“Then he would shake his head sadly. ‘No, she hasn’t poor dear Susan’s flow,’ he would say. ‘Ah! what a woman that was!’
“At night she would do her best, but it was a lame and halting performance by comparison. After rating him for little over three-quarters of an hour, she would sink back on the pillow, and want to go to sleep. But he would shake her gently by the shoulder.