s in
a tone of such contempt that Maurice was glad to shirk the subject.

"It's all she wants," Krafft had replied, when his companion ventured
to take her part. "She wouldn't thank you to be treated differently.
Believe me, women are all alike; they are made to be trodden on.
Ill-usage brings out their good points--just as kneading makes dough
light. Let them alone, or pamper them, and they spread like a weed, and
choke you"--and he quoted a saying about going to women and not
forgetting the whip, at which Maurice stood aghast.

"But why, if you despise a person like that--why have her always about
you?" he cried, at the end of a flaming plea for woman's dignity and
worth.

Krafft shrugged his shoulders. "I suppose the truth is we are dependent
on them--yes, dependent, from the moment we are laid in the cradle.
It's a woman who puts on our first clothes and a woman who puts on our
last. But why talk about these things?"--he slipped his arm through
Maurice's. "Tell me about yourself; and when you are tired of talking,
I will play."

It usually ended in his playing. They ranged through the highways and
byways of music.

One afternoon--it was a warm, wet, grey day towards the end of
August--Maurice found Krafft in a strangely apathetic mood. The
weather, this moist warmth, had got on his nerves, he said; he had been
unable to settle to anything; was weighed down by a lassitude heavier
than iron. When Maurice entered, he was stretched on the sofa, with
closed eyes; on his chest slept Wotan, the one-eyed cat, now growing
sleek and fat. While Maurice was trying to rally him, Krafft sprang up.
With a precipitance that was the extreme opposite of his previous
sloth, he lowered both window-blinds, and, lighting two candles, set
them on the piano, where they dispersed the immediate darkness, but no
more.

"I am going to play TRISTAN to you."

Maurice had learnt by this time that it was useless to try to thwart
Krafft. He laughed and nodded, and having nothing in particular to do,
lay down in the latter's place on the sofa.

Krafft shook his hair back, and began the prelude to the opera in a
rapt, ecstatic way, finding in the music an outlet for all his
nervousness. At first, he played from memory; when this gave out, he
set the piano-score up before him, then forgot it again, and went on
playing by heart. Sometimes he sang the different parts, in a light,
sweet tenor; sometimes recited them, with dramatic fervour. Onl