of brainlessness that he
always wears. How one would enjoy seeing a man--a real
one with Nevada whiskers and long boots--land him one
solid kick from behind.

Then comes The Woman of the snoopopathic story. She is
always "beautifully groomed" (who these grooms are that
do it, and where they can be hired, I don't know), and
she is said to be "exquisitely gowned."

It is peculiar about The Woman that she never seems to
wear a _dress_--always a "gown." Why this is, I cannot
tell. In the good old stories that I used to read, when
I could still read for the pleasure of it, the heroines
--that was what they used to be called--always wore
dresses. But now there is no heroine, only a woman in a
gown. I wear a gown myself--at night. It is made of
flannel and reaches to my feet, and when I take my candle
and go out to the balcony where I sleep, the effect of
it on the whole is not bad. But as to its "revealing
every line of my figure"--as The Woman's gown is always
said to--and as to its "suggesting even more than it
reveals"--well, it simply does _not_. So when I talk of
"gowns" I speak of something that I know all about.

Yet, whatever The Woman does, her "gown" is said to
"cling" to her. Whether in the street or in a _cabaret_
or in the drawing-room, it "clings." If by any happy
chance she throws a lace wrap about her, then it clings;
and if she lifts her gown--as she is apt to--it shows,
not what I should have expected, but a _jupon_, and even
that clings. What a _jupon_ is I don't know. With my
gown, I never wear one. These people I have described,
The Man and The Woman--The Snoopopaths--are, of course,
not husband and wife, or brother and sister, or anything
so simple and old-fashioned as that. She is some one
else's wife. She is _The Wife of the Other Man_. Just
what there is, for the reader, about other men's wives,
I don't understand. I know tons of them that I wouldn't
walk round a block for. But the reading public goes wild
over them. The old-fashioned heroine was unmarried. That
spoiled the whole story. You could see the end from the
beginning. But with Another Man's Wife, the way is blocked.
Something has got to happen that would seem almost obvious
to anyone.

The writer, therefore, at once puts the two snoopos--The
Man and The Woman--into a frightfully indelicate position.
The more indelicate it is, the better. Sometimes she gets
into his motor by accident after the theatre, or they
both engage the dra