_fellatio_ on him. Mrs. D. thought such practices abominable and
could not imagine how a woman could like doing such a thing.

"When she was out walking with me one day T.D.'s name came up and
she said in a slightly altered voice: 'He told me he loved me!'
It was a word seldom used by her except in jest. I threw a
startled look at her and caught an inquisitive and apologetic
look in return, such a strange and touching glance that I saw I
had not yet understood her,--there was an enigma somewhere. When,
bit by bit, she told me her life, I understood, or thought I
understood, that strange childlike glance in this young woman
steeped to her eyes in sin. No one had ever made love to her or
spoken to her of love in her life.

"It had commenced at school. She must have been a particularly
fine and handsome girl, judging from her photographs. She had
seen boys playing with girls' privates under the form and felt
jealous that they did not play with her's. She had no mother to
look after her and she soon found plenty of boys to play with
her, and young men, too, as she grew older. She took it as she
took her meals. She had been really fond of her child's father,
but as he had shown no tenderness for her, nothing but a craving
for sensual gratification, she would rather have died than let
him know. She soon tired of her attachments, she told me. She did
not like T.D. He was not the complacent husband; he was spirited
enough, but he believed everything she told him. One day he came
home unexpectedly when we were together on the bare palliass in
her room. It was a critical moment when his knocks were heard,
and in the hurry and excitement some moisture was left on the
bed. The knocks became louder, but she was calmer than I, and
bade me run down to the closet. I could hear her cheerful and
chaffing voice greeting him. When I walked in back to my own room
she called out: 'Here's T. home!' I learned afterward that he had
been surly and suspicious, and had seen the moisture on the bed,
and asked about it, whereupon she had turned the tables upon him
completely; he ought to be ashamed of himself; she knew what he
meant by his insinuations; if he must know how that moisture come
on the bed, why she put the soap there in a hurry to catch a
flea. He believed her and brought her a present next da