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Wanted—a Bicycle.

By BERNARD CAPES.

I.

HAD Mr. John Tremills dared to express an independent opinion upon anything in the wide world, rational dress for women would have been its motif. To all ordinary social questions he was a sensitive plant—a very mimosa of retiredness. He would subscribe to any fashion or condition the most abhorrent to his instincts, rather than run the risk of being cross-examined as to his objections. Thus, like all shy men, he was seldom true to himself; and, thus coerced by timidity, he was often driven to play a part, like a weeping monkey on an organ.

But he had one firm moral line of demarcation; and that was “rational dress.” On this subject he could wax fluent and self-assertive, even until he would come to picture himself a very unassailable champion of the rights of man—a cause usually overcrowded by that of the wrongs of women.

“What is all this pother?” he would, for instance, cry to some intimate friend after fish and the second glass of sherry. “Skirts are the prerogative of women, not on any grounds of morality, but because for the most part women have knock-knees.”

Mr. John Tremills favoured few of those higher exercises his independent position might permit him, He was neither “sporting” nor sportive; but he rode a pneumatic tyre, and did it well, too.

He lived in a low, embowered, old-fashioned house on Streatham Common, and thence it was a common custom with him to make long excursions by road to places of interest near or far, as whim suggested. Sometimes he would be away for a day or two at a time; and such trips he was in the habit of alluding to as holiday ones—as if his life were not all one extended holiday. But wealth salves its conscience with many such little misapplications of terms.

Now, one October afternoon Mr. Tremills was journeying homewards from Dorking, the glow of memory reflecting upon his face a certain smug happiness resulting from a convivial evening spent at the White Horse Inn in that town.

He had chanced to meet a most agreeable companion at the coffee-room dinner table; and had slid into converse with him on a variety of subjects, the most enthralling of which had undoubtedly been rational dress for women. On this the stranger had had much to say, and to say after a rather tempestuous fashion.

“Hang the women!” he had remarked (he went as far as that), “Rational dress for a sex that doesn’t understand reason! Great Scot! She prides herself upon her intuition. It'll all go with trousers—a house divided against itself. If she jumps to conclusions, she'll come a cropper. But I don’t believe in the movement. It’s a mere fashion. She’s just riding a hobby-horse for the time — that’s it, and virtually the skirt’s over her legs still, and will ever be, for all the dummy shanks set astride of the saddle.”

This was not polite, but it pleased Mr. Tremills, who felt very strongly in the matter. So he made up in his shy way to the stranger, and, later in the evening, lost fifteen shillings to him at billiards,

He would have liked to resume the conversation with him the next morning; but—so it appeared—he had already departed, and without paying his bill—an item of information retailed by the waitress which was like a cold douche to the sensitive gentleman.

“Bless you, sir,” said the girl, “the fairer-spoke such rubbish is, the better to be on one’s guard. We experience a many of them gentry in the inn business, and I never knew one of them but could have wheedled a lord justice out of his wig.”

There seemed an allusion so pointed in this to his own timid credulity, that Mr. Tremills dropped the subject and ordered cold chicken and an omelette.

But, later in the day, on his journey homewards, the humour of the experience struck him, and he laughed to think how he had subscribed on moral grounds to the opinions of a swindler.

On a lonely stretch of road he was carolling in pure lightness of heart, when he became aware, with a bashful shock, that he had sped past a seated female figure, so hidden in the long grass and growth of the roadside that he had not observed until close upon it.