The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (12.1897)

At Twickenham

By Ella D’Arcy

hen John Corbett married Minnie Wray, her sister Loetitia,

their parents being dead, came to live under his roof also,
which seemed to Corbett the most natural arrangement in the
world, for he was an Irishman, and the Irish never count the
cost of an extra mouth. “ Where there’s enough for two, there’s
enough for three,” is a favourite saying of theirs, and even in the
most impecunious Irish household no one ever dreams of grudging
you your bite of bread or sup o’ th’ crathur.

But Corbett was not impecunious. On the contrary, he was
fairly well off, being partner in and traveller for an Irish whiskey
house, and earning thus between eight and nine hundred a year.
In the Income Tax returns he put the figure down as five hundred,
but in conversation he referred to it casually as over a thousand ;
for he had some of the vices of his nationality as well as most of
its virtues, and to impress Twickenham with a due sense of the
worth of John Corbett was perhaps his chief preoccupation out of
business hours.

He lived in an imitation high art villa on the road to Strawberry
Hill j a villa that rejoiced in the name of “Braemar,” gilded in
gothic letters upon the wooden gate ; a villa that flared up into
pinnacles, blushed with red-brick, and mourned behind sad-tinted

glass.