The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories

an who was at the moment his only neighbour in the quiet restaurant they both frequ

ed him, for he's not in the least present-except inasmuch a

truths, twisted his lean neck toward the younger man and cackled out shrewdly: "Ah, it's generally a woman who is at the bottom of the

shing back his plate, called out with a perfectly unbendin

ount was presented; but the waiter, to whom he was evidently a familiar presence, received the tribute with

oks of my youth. I believe it was all a mistake about the owl and the prairie-dog, but it isn't about the unexpected. The fact is, the unexpected is the devil-the sooner you find that o

rick-bat. That's why I always take my meals at this restaurant. I know just how much onion they put in things-if I went to the next place I shouldn't. And I always take the same streets to come here-I've been doing it for ten years now. I know at which crossings to look out-I know what

, and Garnett said with a smile: "Doesn't such a p

ots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round aft

e," the young man said, pouring his win

s friend. "Lots of people have found out the s

advanced with his shabby overcoat and umbrella. Then he nodded to Garnett, lifted his

the enjoyment of his old friend's conversation. Amid the flashy sophistications of the Parisian life to which Garnett's trade introduced him, the American sage's conversation had the crisp and homely flavor of a native dish-one of the domestic compounds for which the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a mark of the old man's impersonality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had never got beyond idly wondering who he might be, where he lived, and what his occupations were. He was presumably a bachelor-a man of family

hey appeared to preoccupy him only as illustrating the boundless perversity of mankind. The exhibition of human folly never ceased to divert him, and though his examples of it seemed mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous daily paper, he found there matter for endless variations on his favorite theme. If this monotony of topic did not weary the younger man, it was because he fancied he could detect under it the tragic implication of the fixed idea-of some gre