At home Mr. Share was a fat man with a black beard and moustache, who adored his daughter and loved his wife. A strict monogamist, whose life would bear the fullest investigation, he was, nevertheless, what is euphemistically called "uxorious." He returned home of a night--often late, on account of evening classes--with ravishment. He knew that his wife and daughter would be ready to receive him, and they were. He kissed and fondled them. He praised them to their faces, asserting that their like could not be discovered among womankind, and he repeated again and again that his little Lilian was very beautiful. He ate and drank a good supper. If he loved his wife he loved also eating and drinking. Now and then he would arrive with half a bottle of champagne sticking out of his overcoat pocket. Not that he came within a thousand miles of "drinking"! He did not. He would not even keep champagne or any wine (except Australian burgundy) in the house; but he would pop in at the wine merchant’s when the fancy took him.
He seldom worried his dears with his professional troubles. Only if organization and committees were specially exasperating would he refer, and then but casually, to the darker side of existence. As for art, he never mentioned it, save to deride some example of "Continental" or "advanced" or "depraved" or "perverse" art (comprehensively described as "futurist") which had regrettably got into the pages of _The Studio_, the only magazine to which he subscribed. Nor did he ever in his prime paint or sketch for pleasure. But at the beginning of every year he would set to work to do a small thing or two for the Royal Academy, which small thing or two were often accepted by the Royal Academy, though never, one is sorry to say, sold. The Royal Academy soirée was Lilian’s sole outlet into the great world. She could not, however, be as enthusiastic about it as were her father and mother; for in the privacy of her mind she held the women thereat to be a most dowdy and frumpy lot.
The girl loved her father and mother; she also pitied her mother and hated her father. She pitied her mother for being an utterly acquiescent slave with no will of her own, and hated her father because he had not her ambition to rise above the state of the frumpy middle middle-class--and for other reasons. The man had realized his own ambitions, and was a merry soul sunk in contentment. The world held nothing that he wanted and did not possess. He looked up to the upper classes without envy or jealousy, and read about them with ingenuous joy. He had no instinct for any sort of elegance.