ver-vowelled slang of the male, until, tiring of this foolishness,
they would end up by flinging the food at the pictures on the walls, the
usual pellet being softened bread and the favourite target the noses in
the family portraits, which, hit and covered with a sprawling mess,
looked so ridiculous as to provoke screams of laughter.

The talk at table was generally of horses and dogs, but sometimes it was
of love, courtship and marriage, including conjugal fidelity, which was
a favourite subject of ridicule, with both the women and the men.

Thus my husband would begin by saying (he often said it in my hearing)
that once upon a time men took their wives as they took their horses, on
trial for a year and a day, and "really with some women there was
something to say for the old custom."

Then Mr. Vivian would remark that it was "a jolly good idea, by Jove,"
and if he "ever married, by the Lord that's just what he would do."

Then Mr. Eastcliff would say that it was a ridiculous superstition that
a woman should have her husband all to herself, "as if he were a kind of
toothbrush which she could not share with anybody else," and somebody
would add that she might as reasonably want her dentist or her
hairdresser to be kept for her own use only.

After that the ladies, not to be left behind, would join in the off-hand
rattle, and one of them would give it as her opinion that a wife might
have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be well off.

"Ugh!" said Alma one night, shrugging her shoulders. "Think of a poor
woman being tied for life to an entirely faithful husband!"

"I adore the kind of man who goes to the deuce for a woman--Parnell, and
Gambetta and Boulanger and that sort," said a "smart" girl of three or
four-and-twenty, whereupon Camilla Eastcliff (she was a Russian) cried:

"That's vhy the co-respondents in your divorce courts are so sharming.
They're like the villayns in the plays--always so dee-lightfully
vicked."

Oh, the sickening horror of it all! Whether it was really moral
corruption or only affectation and pose, it seemed equally shocking, and
though I bore as much of it as I could with a cheerful face, I escaped
as often as possible to the clean atmosphere of my own room.

But even there I was not always allowed to be alone, for Alma's mother
frequently followed me. She was a plump little person in a profuse
ornamentation of diamond rings and brooches, with little or no
education, and a re