y given to fits of temper. At
times she could be quite pleasant: but when she wasn't life with her must
have been exciting. He had stood it for about seven years; and then one
day, without a word of warning to anyone, he went away and left her. As
she was quite able to keep herself, this seemed to be the best
arrangement possible, and everybody wondered why he had never thought of
it before, I did not see him again for nine months, until I ran against
him by pure chance on the Koln platform, where I was waiting for a train
to Paris. He told me they had made up all their differences by
correspondence, and that he was then on his way back to her. He seemed
quite cheerful and expectant.

"'Do you think she's really reformed?' I says. 'Do you think nine months
is long enough to have taught her a lesson?' I didn't want to damp him,
but personally I have never known but one case of a woman being cured of
nagging, and that being brought about by a fall from a third-story
window, resulting in what the doctors called permanent paralysis of the
vocal organs, can hardly be taken as a precedent.

"'No,' he answers, 'nor nine years. But it's been long enough to teach
me a lesson.'

"'You know me,' he goes on. 'I ain't a quarrelsome sort of chap. If
nobody says a word to me, I never says a word to anybody; and it's been
like that ever since I left her, day in and day out, all just the same.
Up in the morning, do your bit of work, drink your glass of beer, and to
bed in the evening; nothing to excite you, nothing to rouse you. Why,
it's a mere animal existence.'

"He was a rum sort of chap, always thought things out from his own point
of view as it were."

"Yes, a curious case," I remarked to Henry; "not the sort of story to put
about, however. It might give women the idea that nagging is attractive,
and encourage them to try it upon husbands who do not care for that kind
of excitement."

"Not much fear of that," replied Henry. "The nagging woman is born, as
they say, not made; and she'll nag like the roses bloom, not because she
wants to, but because she can't help it. And a woman to whom it don't
come natural will never be any real good at it, try as she may. And as
for the men, why we'll just go on selecting wives according to the old
rule, so that you never know what you've got till it's too late for you
to do anything but make the best or the worst of it, according as your
fancy takes you.

"There was a fe