Having opened the front-door (with the thinnest, neatest latch-key in the Five Towns), he entered his home and stumbled slightly over a brush that was lying against the sunk door-mat.  He gazed at that brush with resentment.  It was a dilapidated hand-brush.  The offensive object would have been out of place, at nightfall, in the lobby of any house.  But in the lobby of his house—­the house which he had planned a dozen years earlier, to the special end of minimizing domestic labour, and which he had always kept up to date with the latest devices—­in his lobby the spectacle of a vile, outworn hand-brush at tea-time amounted to a scandal.  Less than a fortnight previously he had purchased and presented to his wife a marvellous electric vacuum-cleaner, surpassing all former vacuum-cleaners.  You simply attached this machine by a cord to the wall, like a dog, and waved it in mysterious passes over the floor, like a fan, and the house was clean!  He was as proud of this machine as though he had invented it, instead of having merely bought it; every day he inquired about its feats, expecting enthusiastic replies as a sort of reward for his own keenness:  and be it said that he had had enthusiastic replies.

And now this obscene hand-brush!

As he carefully removed his hat and his beautiful new Melton overcoat (which had the colour and the soft smoothness of a damson), he animadverted upon the astounding negligence of women.  There were Nellie (his wife), his mother, the nurse, the cook, the maid—­five of them; and in his mind they had all plotted together—­a conspiracy of carelessness—­to leave the inexcusable tool in his lobby for him to stumble over.  What was the use of accidentally procuring three hundred and forty-one pounds?

Still no sign of Nellie, though he purposely made a noisy rattle with his ebon walking-stick.  Then the maid burst out of the kitchen with a tray and the principal utensils for high tea thereon.  She had a guilty air.  The household was evidently late.  Two steps at a time he rushed upstairs to the bathroom, so as to be waiting in the dining-room at six precisely, in order, if possible, to shame the household and fill it with remorse and unpleasantness.  Yet ordinarily he was not a very prompt man, nor did he delight in giving pain.  On the contrary, he was apt to be casual, blithe and agreeable.

The bathroom was his peculiar domain, which he was always modernizing, and where his talent for the ingenious organization of comfort, and his utter indifference to aesthetic beauty, had the fullest scope.  By universal consent admitted to be the finest bathroom in the Five Towns, it typified the whole house.  He was disappointed on this occasion to see no untidy trace in it of the children’s ablution; some transgression of the supreme domestic law that the bathroom must always be free and immaculate when father wanted it would have suited his gathering humour.  As he washed his hands and cleansed his well-trimmed nails with a nail-brush that had cost five shillings and sixpence, he glanced at himself in the mirror, which he was splashing.  A stoutish, broad-shouldered, fair, chubby man, with a short bright beard and plenteous bright hair!  His necktie pleased him; the elegance of his turned-back wristbands pleased him; and he liked the rich down on his forearms.