to grow fat. Still--"

Katje made an observation.

"Her mother," pursued the Vrouw Grobelaar, still holding me
fixed, "spent seventeen years in one room, because she
could not go through the door; and when she died they took
the roof on and hoisted her out like a bullock from a well.
But as I was saying, it is not well that idle men--those
with leisure for their littlenesses, like schoolmasters and
doctors and Predikants should have pretty wives, or they
tend to waste themselves. A man with real work and money
matters and the governing of cattle and land and Kafirs to
fill his day, for such a one it is very well. Her
prettiness is an interval, like the drink he takes in the
noonday. But for an idle man it becomes the air he
breathes. He is all-dependent on it, and it is a small and
breakable thing.

"Look how men have been wrecked upon a morsel of pink-and-
white, how strong brains have scattered like seed from a
burst pod for a trifle of hunger in a pair of eyes! I
remember many such cases which would make you stare for the
foolishness of men and the worthlessness of some women.
There was the Heer Mostert, Predikant at Dopfontein, who
fell to blasphemy and witchcraft when his wife Paula was
sick and muttered emptily among her pillows."

The old lady shifted in her wide chair and took her eyes
from me at last.

"She was pretty, if you like," she said. "A tall girl, with
a small red mouth, and hair that swathed her head like
coils of bronze. The Predikant, who had more fire in him
than a minister should have, and more fullness of blood
than is good for any man, spent the half of his life in the
joy of being near to her. She was full in the face and slow
with a sleek languor, but on his coming there was to see a
quickness of welcome spread itself in her. She would flush
warmly, and her eyes would cry to him. Their love glowed
between them; they were children together in that mighty
bond. So when a spring that came down with chill rains
smote Paula with a fever, and laid her weakly on her bed,
the Predikant was a widower already, and walked with a face
white and hard, drawn suddenly into new lines of pain and
fear.

"Women are strange in sickness. Some are infants, greatly
needing caresses and the neighborhood of one tender and
familiar. Others grow bitter, with an unwonted spite and
temper, venting their ill-ease on all about them. But after
the first, Paula was neither of these. The sense of things
left he