MR.    SMEETH    GETS    HIS    RISE	2Q<)
thank you enough, Mr. Poole—"
"And just get on with your work, Stanley," said the
same voice. But oh!-the difference in intonation. "I
told you those letters have to catch the country post.
Be ready to slip out with them. Got the envelopes
there?"
On his tram, going home, Mr. Smeeth turned the
pages of his evening paper, looking for those appeals
to "The Saving Man" and "The Small Investor." One
of the advertisements asked him, not for the first time,
what he was going to do in the Evening of Life, and
though he still had no answer ready, for once he could
look at it without feeling himself shrinking somewhere.
Already he carried a good insurance for a man in his
position; he had a bit, for emergencies, in the Post
Office Savings Bank; and now he would have over a
pound a week to put away. Now if he did that for ten
years, fifteen years, perhaps increased it if the firm went
on doing so well and gave him another rise, why, then,
surely—and he lost himself in pleasant speculations.
He arrived home to find Edna sitting over the fire,
hugging herself in misery, and red and swollen about
the eyes.
"Hello, hello," he cried, "what's the matter here?"
"Lost my job," Edna mumbled into the fire.
"Yes, she's a fine one, isn't she?" And Mrs. Smeeth
bounced into the room with a saucepan in her hand.
"I told her to be careful, last night, the way they were
getting their knife into her, and in she comes, half an
hour ago, and tells me they've had a regular dust-up
and the long and short of it all is, my lady's sacked."
"It wasn't my fault," said Edna, who had obviously
said this a great many times before.