re strength and less scandal in society."

I laughed. "There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
the world and my sex thoroughly. He says as much in his books.--Have you
read his 'A Sweet Apocalypse'? He said more than as much to me. But he
knows a mere nothing about women--their amusing inconsistencies;
their infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their
self-torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods
of religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints
of a woman's position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you. He has only got two
or three kinds of women in his mind, and the representatives of these
fooled him, as far as he went with them, to their hearts' content.
Believe me, there is no one quite so foolish as the professional student
of character. He sees things with a glamour; he is impressionable; he
immediately begins to make a woman what he wishes her to be for his
book, not what she is; and women laugh at him when they read his books,
or pity him if they know him personally. I venture to say that I could
make Mr. Clovelly use me in a novel--not 'A Sweet Apocalypse'--as a
placid lover of fancy bazaars and Dorcas societies, instead of a very
practical person, who has seen life without the romantic eye, and knows
as well the working of a buccaneering craft--through consular papers and
magisterial trials, of course--as of a colonial Government House. But it
is not worth while trying to make him falsify my character. Besides, you
are here to amuse me."

This speech, as she made it, was pleasantly audacious and clever. I
laughed, and made a gesture of mock dissent, and she added: "Now I have
finished my lecture. Please tie my shoe-lace there, and then, as I said,
amuse me. Oh, you can, if you choose! You are clever when you like to
be. Only, this time, do not let it be a professor's wife who foolishly
destroys herself, and cuts short what might have been a brilliant
career."

On the instant I determined to probe deeper into her life, and try her
nerve, by telling a story with enough likeness to her own (if she was
the wife of Boyd Madras) to affect her acutely; though I was not sure I
could succeed. A woman who triumphs over sea-sickness, whom steam from
the boilers never affects, nor the propeller-screw disturbs, has little
to fear from the words of a man who is neither adro