without sequel,
without consequence; but there is nothing to be done in her regard except
so to remember her. And thus much I think I owe after having looked,
from the midst of the negative happiness that is given to so many for a
space of years, at some minutes of her despair. She was hanging on the
man's arm in her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting.
She had wept so hard that her face was disfigured. Across her nose was
the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear. Haydon saw it on the
face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London street. I
remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her
intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting it. She was
afraid that the man would throw himself under the train. She was afraid
that he would be damned for his blasphemies; and as to this her fear was
mortal fear. It was horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.

Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour.
No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But
has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day
it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image. Constantly a red
blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the
dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And
at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my
hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were
giving Offenbach. The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the
little town was placarded with announcements of _La Bella Elena_. The
peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half the hot
night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its pauses. But
the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of
those three figures at the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of
the day.

POCKET VOCABULARIES

A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in such a
collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a portable
vocabulary. It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad-
dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes.
Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic' things, of 'quaint' things and
'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy' Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-
painting' (