At the Cauldron we don’t generally go in for romance, but a romance written by a man and set in the provincial middle-class at the turn of the century was just too interesting an idea to pass up.  George  Pearson, the traveling draper, thinks his friend school-teacher Freddie Bates  needs to get married – to a nice little widow who ‘knows the ropes’.  Freddie gets his nice little widow but the next ten years of his life are not all plain sailing. He gets involved in troubles such as never occurred in his bachelor days but the delicate silk strands that bind him to the unpredictable little woman who has taken him for her second husband are firm. Less of a romance, and more of a satire on ‘respectable’ life in the early 1900s.