Mrs. DABCHICK could not be accused by her best friends of
over-refinement, but everybody agreed that she was just the homely,
comfortable, housewifely person who would always make DABCHICK happy,
and be a good and careful mother to his children. Often in the old
days when I came down to Balham and took pot-luck with DABCHICK, while
Mrs. DABCHICK beamed serenity and middle-class satisfaction upon me
from the other end of the table, and the juvenile JOHNNY DABCHICK
recited in a piping treble one of Mr. GEORGE R. SIMS's most moving
pieces for our entertainment, often, I say, have I envied the simple
happiness of that family, and gone back to my bachelor chambers with
an increased sense of dissatisfaction. Why, I thought to myself, had
fate denied to me the peaceful domesticity of the DABCHICKS? I was as
good a man as DABCHICK, probably, if the truth were known, a better
than he. Yet there he was with a good wife, an agreeable family, and
a comfortable income to compensate him for his extravagance with the
letter h, while I had to toil and moil in solitary gloom.
Now, however, all is changed. In an evil moment for himself, DABCHICK
speculated largely and successfully in the Gold Trust of Guatemala.
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