ent away,
apparently composed herself to slumber in the roadway of the
pitch-black High Street, and was killed by a motor-car. And that, bar
the funeral, was the end of Mrs. Tufton.

From her bereaved husband, with whom I at once communicated, I received
the following reply:

"Dear Sir,

"Yours to hand announcing the accidental death of my wife, which I need
not say I deeply regret. You will be interested to hear that I have
been offered a commission in the Royal Fusiliers, which I am now able
to accept. In view of the same, any expense to which you may be put to
give my late wife honourable burial, I shall be most ready to defray.

"With many thanks for your kindness in informing me of this unfortunate
circumstance,

"I am,

"Yours faithfully,
"JOHN P. TUFTON."

"I think he's a horrid, callous, cold-blooded fellow!" cried Betty when
I showed her this epistle.

"After all," said I, "she wasn't a model wife. If the fatal motor-car
hadn't come along, the probability is that she would have received poor
Tufton on his next leave with something even more deadly than a poker.
Now and again the Fates have brilliant inspirations. This was one of
them. Now, you see the virago-clogged Tufton is a free man, able to
accept a commission and start a new life as an officer and a gentleman."

"I think you're perfectly odious. Odious and cynical," she exclaimed
wrathfully.

"I think," said I, "that a living warrior is better than a dead--
Disappointment."

"You don't understand," she stormed. "If I didn't love you, I could
rend you to pieces."

"It is because I do understand, my dear," said I, enjoying the flashing
beauty of her return to Artemisian attitudes, "that I particularly
characterised the dear lady as a disappointment."

"I think," she said, in dejected generalisation, "the working out of
the whole scheme of the universe is a disappointment."

"The High Originators of the scheme seem to bear it pretty
philosophically," I rejoined; "so why shouldn't we?"

"They're gods and we're human," said Betty.

"Precisely," said I. "And oughtn't it to be our ideal to approximate to
the divine attitude?"

Again Betty declared that I was odious. From her point of view--No.
That is an abuse of language. There are mental states in which a woman
has no point of view at all. She wanders over an ill-defined circular
area of vision. That is why, in such conditions, you can never pin a
woman down with a shaft of logic