This surely could not be ideal Putney that he was in! It must be some other place of the same name.

The mismanagement of a brewery a hundred and fifty miles from London; the failure of the British working-man to drink his customary pints in several scattered scores of public-houses, had most unaccountably knocked the bottom out of the Putney system of practical philosophy.

Putney posters were now merely disgusting, Putney trade gross and futile, the tobacconist a narrow-minded and stupid bourgeois; and so on.
Alice and he met on their doorstep, each in the act of pulling out a latchkey.
"Oh!" she said, when they were inside, "it's done for! There's no mistake--it's done for! We shan't get a penny this year, not one penny! And he doesn't think there'll be anything next year either! And the shares'll go down yet, he says.

I never heard of such a thing in all my life! Did you ?" He admitted sympathetically that he had not.
After she had been upstairs and come down again her mood suddenly changed.

"Well," she smiled, "whether we get anything or not, it's tea-time.