to see how hard Nature is on a woman
compared to a man. Unless she is a genius or a jelly-fish there seems to
be only one career open to her, and that is a lottery, with marriage for
the prizes, and for the blanks--oh dear, oh dear! Not that I have
anything to complain of, and I hate to be so sensitive. Life is
wonderfully interesting, and the world is such an amusing place that I've
no patience with people who run away from it, and if I were a man--but
wait, only wait, good people!"

V.

John Storm had made one other friend at Bishopsgate Street--the dog of
the monastery. It was a half-bred bloodhound, and nobody seemed to know
whence he came and why he was there. He was a huge, ungainly, and most
forbidding creature, and partly for that reason, but chiefly because it
was against rule to fix the affections on earthly things, the brothers
rarely caressed him. Unnoticed and unheeded, he slept in the house by day
and prowled through the court by night, and had hardly ever been known to
go out into the streets. He was the strictest monk in the monastery, for
he eyed every stranger as if he had been Satan himself, and howled at all
music except the singing in the church.

On seeing John for the first time, he broadened his big flews and
stiffened his thick stern, according to his wont with all intruders, but
in this instance the intruder was not afraid. John patted him on the
peaked head and rubbed him on the broad nose, then opened his mouth and
examined his teeth, and finally turned him on his back and tickled his
chest, and they were fast friends and comrades forever after.

Some weeks after the dedication they were in the courtyard together, and
the dog was pitching and plunging and uttering deep bays which echoed
between the walls like thunder at play. It was the hour of morning
recreation, between Terce and Sext, and the religious were lolling about
and talking, and one lay brother was sweeping up the leaves that had
fallen from the tree, for the winter had come and the branches were bare.
The lay brother was Brother Paul, and he made sidelong looks at John, but
kept his head down and went on with his work without speaking. One by one
the brothers went back to the house, and John made ready to follow them,
but Paul put himself in his way. He was thinner than before, and his eyes
were red and his respiration difficult. Nevertheless, he smiled in a
childlike way, and began to talk of the dog. What life there w