ing and puffing, and talking and guffawing in the
vulgarest way, _en route_ to swill and smoke and puff and guffaw
somewhere else.

Whoever could tell what they were talking about? these creatures.

They had no form or grace like a woman--no lovely sloped shoulders, no
beautiful bosom, no sweeping curve of robe down to the feet. No softness
of cheek, or silky hair, or complexion, or taper fingers, or arched
eyebrows; no sort of style whatever. They were mere wooden figures; and,
in short, sublimely ugly.

There was a good deal of truth in Amaryllis' reflections; it was a pity
a woman was not taken into confidence when the men were made.

Suppose the women were like the men, and we had to make love to such a
set of bristly, grisly wretches!--pah! shouldn't we think them ugly! The
patience of the women, putting up with us so long!

As for the muscles on which we pride ourselves so much, in a woman's
eyes (though she prefers a strong man) they simply increase our
extraordinary ugliness.

But if we look pale, and slim, and so forth, then they despise us, and
there is no doubt that altogether the men were made wrong.

"And Jack's the very ugliest of the lot," thought Amaryllis. "He just
_is_ ugly."

Pounding up the slope, big John Duck came by-and-by to the gateway, and
entering without ceremony, as is the custom in the country, found Mr.
Iden near the back door talking to a farmer who had seated himself on a
stool.

He was a middle-aged man, stout and florid, rough as a chunk of wood,
but dressed in his best brown for the fair. Tears were rolling down his
vast round cheeks as he expatiated on his grievances to Mr. Iden:--

"Now, just you see how I be helped up with this here 'ooman," he
concluded as Duck arrived. Mr. Iden, not a little glad of an opportunity
to escape a repetition of the narrative, to which he had patiently
listened, took Jack by the arm, and led him indoors. As they went the
man on the stool extended his arm towards them hopelessly:--"Just you
see how I be helped up with this here 'ooman!"

A good many have been "helped up" with a woman before now.

Mrs. Iden met Jack with a gracious smile--she always did--yet there
could not have been imagined a man less likely to have pleased her.

A quick, nervous temperament, an eye sharp to detect failings or
foolishness, an admirer of briskness and vivacity, why did she welcome
John Duck, that incarnation of stolidity and slowness, that enormous
mount