Hams are not what they used to be.' It would be
a pity to be deprived of her Christmas comments, but that loss would be
swallowed up in the general gain."
"Meanwhile," said Janetta, "what am I to say to the Froplinsons?"
THE NAME-DAY
Adventures, according to the proverb, are to the adventurous. Quite as
often they are to the non-adventurous, to the retiring, to the
constitutionally timid. John James Abbleway had been endowed by Nature
with the sort of disposition that instinctively avoids Carlist intrigues,
slum crusades, the tracking of wounded wild beasts, and the moving of
hostile amendments at political meetings. If a mad dog or a Mad Mullah
had come his way he would have surrendered the way without hesitation. At
school he had unwillingly acquired a thorough knowledge of the German
tongue out of deference to the plainly-expressed wishes of a
foreign-languages master, who, though he taught modern subjects, employed
old-fashioned methods in driving his lessons home. It was this enforced
familiarity with an important commercial language which thrust Abbleway
in later years into strange lands where adventures were less easy to
guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an English country town.
The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic
business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there,
continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of
commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even
misadventure, jostling at his elbow.
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