shall never
forget the look Nina gave me when I asked her if she had read it; I
grow hot even now as I recall it. I had waited and waited expecting
her compliments; and at last I could wait no longer, and so asked her;
and she answered me with a look! It was weeks, I am not sure it wasn't
months, before she took me back to her good graces. But Old Childe was
magnanimous; he sent me a little pencil-drawing of his head, inscribed
in the corner, 'To Frankenstein from his Monster.'

V.

It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of
the Latin Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a cafe for her
school-room, and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her
father had a theory in his madness. He was a Bohemian, not in practice
only, but in principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational
manner of existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic
and authentic in one's character, saved one from the artificial, and
brought one into immediate contact with the realities of the world;
and he protested he could see no reason why a human being should be
'cloistered and contracted' because of her sex. 'What would not hurt
my son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter. It will make a man of
her--without making her the less a woman.' So he took her with him to
the Cafe Bleu, and talked in her presence quite as freely as he might
have talked had she been absent. As, in the greater number of his
theological, political, and social convictions, he was exceedingly
unorthodox, she heard a good deal, no doubt, that most of us would
scarcely consider edifying for our daughters' ears; but he had his
system, he knew what he was about. 'The question whether you can touch
pitch and remain undefiled,' he said, 'depends altogether upon the
spirit in which you approach it. The realities of the world, the
realities of life, the real things of God's universe--what have we
eyes for, if not to envisage them? Do so fearlessly, honestly, with a
clean heart, and, man or woman, you can only be the better for it.'
Perhaps his system was a shade too simple, a shade too obvious, for
this complicated planet; but he held to it in all sincerity. It was in
pursuance of the same system, I daresay, that he taught Nina to fence,
and to read Latin and Greek, as well as to play the piano, and turn an
omelette. She could ply a foil against the best of us.

And then, quite suddenly, he died.

I think it was in