was a well; just
a little corner filled with water. Over it was a rough stone coping, and
around, hugging it on three sides almost from sight, were thick, quiet
bushes. He would not have noticed the well at all but for a thin stream,
the breadth of two hands, which tiptoed away from it through a field.
By this well he sat down and scooped the water in his hand and it tasted
good.

He was eating his cake when a sound touched his ear from some distance,
and shortly a woman came down the path carrying a vessel in her hand to
draw water.

She was a big, comely woman, and she walked as one who had no
misfortunes and no misgivings. When she saw the Philosopher sitting by
the well she halted a moment in surprise and then came forward with a
good-humoured smile.

"Good morrow to you, sir," said she.

"Good morrow to you too, ma'am," replied the Philosopher. "Sit down
beside me here and eat some of my cake."

"Why wouldn't I, indeed," said the woman, and she did sit beside him.

The Philosopher cracked a large piece off his cake and gave it to her
and she ate some.

"There's a taste on that cake," said she. "Who made it?"

"My wife did," he replied.

"Well, now!" said she, looking at him. "Do you know, you don't look a
bit like a married man."

"No?" said the Philosopher.

"Not a bit. A married man looks comfortable and settled: he looks
finished, if you understand me, and a bachelor looks unsettled and
funny, and he always wants to be running round seeing things. I'd know a
married man from a bachelor any day."

"How would you know that?" said the Philosopher.

"Easily," said she, with a nod. "It's the way they look at a woman.
A married man looks at you quietly as if he knew all about you. There
isn't any strangeness about him with a woman at all; but a bachelor man
looks at you very sharp and looks away and then looks back again, the
way you'd know he was thinking about you and didn't know what you were
thinking about him; and so they are always strange, and that's why women
like them."

"Why!" said the Philosopher, astonished, "do women like bachelors better
than married men?"

"Of course they do," she replied heartily. "They wouldn't look at the
side of the road a married man was on if there was a bachelor man on the
other side."

"This," said the Philosopher earnestly, "is very interesting."

"And the queer thing is," she continued, "that when I came up the road
and saw you I said to myself 'it's a