their evenings at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling
a strong odour of bay rum, would arrive promptly at quarter past eight,
take off his coat, and thus, as it were stripped for action, would turn
upon the defenceless Edward.

"Vill you mention one great man--yoost one--who is not greater if the
vimmen leave him alone?" he would demand. "Is it Anthony, the conqueror
of Egypt and the East? I vill show you Cleopatra. Und Burns, and
Napoleon, the greatest man what ever lived--vimmen again. I tell you
there is no Elba, no St. Helena if it is not for the vimmen. Und vat
vill you say of Goethe?"

Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.

"He is great, I grant you," Chris would admit, "but vat is he if the
vimmen leave him alone? Divine yoost that." And he would proceed to cite
endless examples of generals and statesmen whose wives or mistresses had
been their bane. Futile Edward's attempts to shift the conversation
to the subject of his own obsession; the German was by far the more
aggressive, he would have none of it. Perhaps if Edward had been willing
to concede that the Bumpuses had been brought to their present lowly
estate by the sinister agency of the fair sex Chris might conditionally
have accepted the theme. Hannah, contemptuously waving a tattered palm
leaf fan, was silent; but on one occasion Janet took away the barber's
breath by suddenly observing:--"You never seem to think of the women
whose lives are ruined by men, Mr. Auermann."

It was unheard-of, this invasion of a man's argument by a woman, and
by a young woman at that. He glared at her through his spectacles, took
them off, wiped them, replaced them, and glared at her again. He did not
like Janet; she was capable of what may be called a speaking silence,
and he had never been wholly unaware of her disapproval and ridicule.
Perhaps he recognized in her, instinctively, the potential qualities of
that emerging modern woman who to him was anathema.

"It is somethings I don't think about," he said.

He was a wizened little man with faience-blue eyes, and sat habitually
hunched up with his hands folded across his shins.

"Nam fuit ante Helenam"--as Darwin quotes. Toward all the masculine
residents of Fillmore Street, save one, the barber's attitude was one
of unconcealed scorn for an inability to recognize female perfidy. With
Johnny Tiernan alone he refused to enter the lists. When the popular
proprietor of the tin shop came saunt