th extraordinary
vigour and emphasis, as though the very enunciation were a blow to the
designs of Satan. The author heard, during a later voyage, that the
Honeyballs did eventually give up the mundane job of supervising
apartments and retired to a quiet sea-side town where they devoted
themselves entirely to "Christian Work."

It was on one of these evening strolls that the author became on
speaking terms with the girl who ate a bun and a glass of milk for
breakfast every morning. It is very easy to get acquainted with a
virtuous girl in England--so easy that the foreigner is frequently
bewildered or inclined to be suspicious of the virtue. It is a
facility difficult to reconcile with our heavily advertised frigidity,
our disconcerting habit of addressing a stranger as though some
invisible third person (an enemy) just behind him were the object of
our dignified disapproval. It may be explained by the fact that, from
the middle classes downward, and excluding the swarms of immigrants in
the large cities, we are a very old race, with a comprehensive
knowledge of our own mentalities. One finds blond, blue-eyed Saxon
children in East Anglia, and there are black-haired, brown-skinned
people in the West Country who have had no foreign admixture to their
Phoenician blood since the Norman Conquest. This makes for a certain
solidarity of sentiment and a corresponding freedom of intercourse.

Not that Mabel would understand any of this if she heard it. She has a
robust and coarse-textured mind curiously contrasted with her pale,
delicate features and sombre black eyes. She was one of those people
who seem suddenly to transmute themselves into totally different
beings the moment one speaks to them. As the author did one evening,
after peering absently through the window of a candy-store down near
the railroad arch below Charing Cross, and seeing her sitting pensive
behind the stacks of merchandise. She was very glad to see a familiar
face and recognised the claim of the breakfast-hour with a tolerant
smile and a cheerful nod. It is very easy, while talking to Mabel,
to understand why there is no native opera in England, and a very
powerful native literature. Opera can only prosper where the emotional
strain between the sexes is so heavy that it must be relieved by song
and gesture. We have nothing of that in England. Women, more even than
men, distrust themselves and eschew the outward trappings of romance.
But this makes for