Here are Ladies

p from his seat

to come in before this hour let her stop out." He stared into the fire fo

flighty as a ball of thistledown-"Doesn't know her own mind for ten minutes together," he groaned. "Hasn't any mind at all," he'd think an hour later. While, on the following day, it might be-"That

ll her misdeeds in her face; then, rating her up, down and round, he had prepared to march away complacent a

wall, with her head in her lap and she crying. Hang it," said he, "you

lips, he found himself in the same position as before, with a mad susp

like a young dog out for a walk: when she met a side-street she bolted down it and was instantly surrounded by adventure and misery, retur

d she was woebegone-"Mar

n," he retorte

ng that she envisaged him as the devil of that particular Hades, instead of as an u

essed h

d of your kinks before you marry," said he. "I've no use for a wife with one eye on me, and it a dubious one, and the other one squinting into a parlour two streets off. You've got to settle down an

time, he had a brown moustache and blue eyes, outside a tailor's shop in Georges Street, with a public-house on one side, and he said he thought I was very pretty

Don't let me catch you talking with a strange man, or you'll get

ts and chance acquaintances, and she was gradually making her husband travel at a similar tangent. When they started to go to church he would find, to his amazement, that they were in the Mu

rab, so she does. She has a squint in her walk. Her boots have a bias outwards. I'm getting

immoral hour, inside a house it is non-moral, but respectable. There is nothing in the street at that time but dubiety. Who would be a husband listening

tinkering. Cut the knot and let who will try to join it then. One pang, and afterwards ease, fresh air, and freedom:

nd that night and requested her h

s trapsin abo

entr

red an eye, toned a long No that wagged v

whereupon he lo

l go," he barked, "If you do go, don't come back here. I'll have a dutiful wife or I'll ha

ace, it grew hot in her voice,

t," said she loudly; "

ot," s

napped, "I'll

u can stay," he roared. "Don

re just as dull as your house is, and nearly as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting, slow house, so it is, and you are a st

had heard the door ba

g to hear a footfall, and an entreating voice at the key-hole; apologies and tears perhaps, and promises of amendment. Now it was after twelve o'clock, darkn

doesn't care a tinker's curse what I say. . . . Let h

en terror, for there was some one in it. It was his wife. He lay down with a hazy, half-mad mind. Had he wronged her? Was she more amenable

red fringe of a debate-Had he wrong

SS OF

n goes to and from his office; the seasons come with the regularity of automata, and go as if they were pushed by an ejector; so, night after night, he strolled from the

ifficult thing to ask for. Always he had been easily discouraged, and he distrusted his French almost as much as other people had reason to. The only time he had varied the

were usually very stalwart, very competent females, who looked as though they had outgrown their sins but remembered them with pleasure. They had the dully-polished, slightly-battered look of a modern antique. The words "M'

ail." At the second repetition the good lady smiled at him, a smile compounded of benevolence and comprehension, and instantly, with a "V'la M'sieu," she handed him The Ne

was respected. The folk who passed stepped sidewards for him, and he took no heed of their passage-a lonely, introspective dog to whom a caress or a bone were equally childish things: Let me alone, he seemed to say, I have my grief, and it is company enough. There was the very superior cat who sat on every window-ledge, winking at life. He (for in France all cats are masculine by order of philology), he did not care a rap for man or dog, but he liked women and permitted them to observe him. There was the man who insinuated himself between the tables at the Café, holding out postcard-representations of the Pantheon, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other places. From beneath these cards his dexterous little finger would suddenly flip other

Perhaps a kind of public surreptitiousness, a quite open furtiveness, had troubled him. Maybe he was not well. He sat at hi

d had been left undone only because they were not sanctioned by immediate social usage. He was often saddened when he thought of the things he had not done. It was the only sadness to which he had access, because the evil deeds which he had c

, and American Billionaires with whom she could adequately elope, and he had both loved and loathed the prospect. What unending, slow quarrels they had together! How her voice had droned pitilessly on his ears! She in one room, he in another, and through the open door there rolled that unending recitation of woes and reproaches, an interminable catalogue of nothings, whi

that it was actually so, to say that he would come home on the morrow night, and she would not be there, and that he would return home every night, and she would never be there. But he could not say it. Somehow the words, although he desired them, would not come. His arm went to her neck and s

in like banners in a storm. There were men with severe, spade-shaped, most responsible-looking beards, and quizzical little eyes which gave the lie to their hairy sedateness-eyes which had spent long years in looking sidewards as a woman passed. There were men of every stage of foppishness-men who had spent so much time on t

were all looking at him; and he returned the severe, or humourous, or appraising gaze of each with a look nicely proportioned to the passer, giving ba

ite by courtesy. He was a bulky man, and as he bent greedily over his compani

re were women of a monumental, a mighty fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments. There were slow eyes that drooped on one heavily as a hand, and quick ones that stabbed and withdrew, and glanced again appealingly, and slid away cursing. There were some who lounged with a false sedateness, and some who fluttered in an equally false timi

other than their own. Raddled faces with heavy eyes and rouged lips. Ragged lips that had been chewed by every mad dog in the world. What lips there were everywhere! Bright scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead of kisses. B

which other men took such interest were drifting beyond him, and (for it seemed that the law of compensation can fail) nothing was drifting towards him in recompense. He foresaw himself as a box with nothing inside it, and he thought-It is not through love or fear or distress that men commit suicide: it is because they have become empty: both the gods and the devils have deserted them and they can n

led again to the stars, and gathered in ecstasy and roared skywards, and the trees did not rob each other more than was absolutely necessary. The men and women were all hidden away, sleeping in their cells, where the moon could not see them, nor the clean wind, nor the stars. They were sundered for a little while from their eternal arithmetic. The grasping hands were lying as quietly as

was three-quarters consumed, and his picture which might be admired when he was dead but which he would never be praised for painting; and, after sticking his foot throug

AN

hate

quietl

e burni

rames

es of y

mooth

u say

never

rest y

hand,

plain as

rinkli

do you

g oppo

stir

u do no

own at

e brows o

WOMEN

they were all delighted. It was so at first he appeared to her. Has a mere girl any protection against a man of that quality? and she was the very merest of

may love her brothers, but she cannot believe that they adequately represent the other sex. Does not every girl wish to marry the antithesis of her brother? The feeling is that one should marry as far outside of the famil

understood or believed in the stories she had read, and so, when the

f she went into a shop, he was pacing on the pavement when she came out. If she went for a walk he was standing at the place farther than which she had decided not to go. She had found him examining a waterfall on the Dodder, leaning over the bear-pit in the Zoologica

. He plucked a handkerchief from somewh

think"-and she had been

its lengthy flaps. "It is his own," she thought a moment later, and she would have laughed like a mad woman, only that she had no time, for he was p

d see him advancing towards her, and knew by his knitted brows that he was searching

r handkerch

d her with freedom, for if once you laugh with a person you admit him to equality, you have ranked him definitely

al, and if she opposed a statement he dropped it instantly and adopted her alternative as one adopts a gift. This astonished her who had been prepared to be terrified. He kept a little distance between them as he walked, and when she looked at him he looked away. She had

there was a colour in the firmament before which one might fall down and worship. Sunlight was not the hot glare which it had been: it was rich, generous, it was inexpressibly beautiful. The colour and scent of flowers became more varied. The world emerged as from shrouds and cerements. It was tender and radiant, co

anywhere. She searched, but he was not anywhere. And the sun became the hot pest it had always been: the heavens were stuffed with dirty clouds the way a second-hand shop is stuffed with dirty bundles: the trees were hulki

raid of me

to his monstrou