the country. We know a wayside station,
on a certain line of railway, about an hour and a half from town, where
we can alight, find eggs and bacon at the village inn and hayricks in
a solitary meadow, and where we can chew the cud of these delights with
the cattle in well-wooded pastures. Judith has a passion for eggs and
bacon and hayricks. My own rapture in their presence is tempered by
the philosophic calm of my disposition. She wore a cotton dress of a
forget-me-not blue which suits her pale colouring. She looked quite
pretty. When I told her so she blushed like a girl. I was glad to
see her in gay humour again. Of late months she has been subject to
moodiness, emotional variability, which has somewhat ruffled the smooth
surface of our companionship. But to-day there has been no trace of
"temperament." She has shown herself the pleasant, witty Judith she
knows I like her to be, with a touch of coquetry thrown in on her
own account. She even spoke amiably of Carlotta. I have not had so
thoroughly enjoyable a day with Judith for a long time.

I don't think she set herself deliberately to please me. That I should
resent. I know that women in order to please an unsuspecting male will
walk weary miles by his side with blisters on their feet and a beatific
smile on their faces. But Judith has far too much commonsense.

Another pleasing feature of the day's jaunt has been the absence of
the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially since her
return from Paris, has been overfond of making. This idle habit of
mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested by an intellectual
interest. One of her great friends is Willoughby, the economic
statistician, who in his humorous moments, writes articles for popular
magazines, illustrated by scale diagrams. He will draw, for instance, a
series of men representing the nations of the world, and varying in bulk
and stature according to the respective populations; and over against
these he will set a series of pigs whose sizes are proportionate to the
amount of pork per head eaten by the different nationalities. To these
queer minds that live on facts (I myself could as easily thrive on a
diet of egg-shells) this sort of pictorial information is peculiarly
fascinating. But Judith, who like most women has a freakish mental as
well as physical digestion, delights in knowing how many hogs a
cabinet minister will eat during a lifetime, and how much of the
earth's surface c