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when she interrupted me with a gesture of impatience.
There, there! Tell me what you have been doing with yourself.
Your letters gave me very little information.
I am afraid, said I, I am a poor letter writer.
I read each ten times over, she said.
I kissed her hand in acknowledgment. Then I rose, lit a
cigarette and walked about the room. Judith shook out her skirts
and settled herself comfortably among the sofacushions.
Well, what crimes have you been committing the past few weeks?
A wandering minstrel was harping Love's Sweet Dream outside the
publichouse below. I shut the window, hastily.
Nothing so bad as that, said I. He ought to be hung and his
wild harp hung behind him.
You are developing nerves, said Judith. Is it a guilty
conscience? She laughed. You are hiding something from me.
I've been aware of it all the time.
Indeed? How?
By the sixth sense of woman!
Confound the sixth sense of woman! I suppose it has been
developed like a cat's whiskers to supply the deficiency of a
natural scent. Also, like the whiskers, it is obtrusive, and a
matter for much irritatingly complacent pride. Judith regarded
me with a mock magisterial air, and I was put into the dock at
once.
Something has happened, I said, desperately. A female woman
has come and taken up her residence at 26 Lingfield Terrace. A
few weeks ago she ate with her fingers and believed the earth was
flat. I found her in the Victoria Embankment Gardens beneath the
terrace of the National Liberal Club, and now she lives on
chocolate creams and the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge.' She is
eighteen and her name is Carlotta. There!
As my cigarette had gone out, I threw it with some peevishness
into the grate. Judith's expression had changed from mock to
real gravity. She sat bolt upright and looked at me somewhat
stonily.
What in the world do you mean, Marcus?
What I say. I'm saddled with the responsibility of a child of
nature as unsophisticated and perplexing as Voltaire's Huron.
She's English and she came from a harem in Syria, and she is as
beautiful as the houris she believes in and is unfortunately
precluded from joining. One of these days I shall be teaching
her her catechism. I have already washed her face. Kindly pity
me as the innocent victim of fantastic circumstances.
I don't see why I should pity you, said Judith.
I felt I had not explained Carlotta tactfully. If there are ten
ways of doing a thing I have noticed that I invariably select the
one way that is wrong. I perceived that somehow or other the

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