deck-beams, from six in the morning
till six in the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I
ought to know.

And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concerned for the
dignity and comeliness of their service. I was, most likely, the only
writer that neat lady had ever caught in the exercise of his craft, and
it distressed me not to be able to remember when it was that I dressed
myself last, and how. No doubt that would be all right in essentials.
The fortune of the house included a pair of gray-blue watchful eyes that
would see to that. But I felt, somehow, as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and dishevelled
down to my very heels. And I am afraid I blinked stupidly. All this was
bad for the honour of letters and the dignity of their service. Seen
indistinctly through the dust of my collapsed universe, the good lady
glanced about the room with a slightly amused serenity. And she was
smiling. What on earth was she smiling at? She remarked casually:

"I am afraid I interrupted you."

"Not at all."

She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was strictly true.
Interrupted--indeed! She had robbed me of at least twenty lives, each
infinitely more poignant and real than her own, because informed with
passion, possessed of convictions, involved in great affairs created out
of my own substance for an anxiously meditated end.

She remained silent for a while, then said, with a last glance all round
at the litter of the fray:

"And you sit like this here writing your--your . . ."

"I--what? Oh, yes! I sit here all day."

"It must be perfectly delightful."

I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on the
verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the porch, and my
boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had espied him from afar.
He came on straight and swift like a cannon-ball, and the noise of the
fight, which burst suddenly upon our ears, was more than enough to scare
away a fit of apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated the gallant
animals. Afterward I told the lady where she would find my wife--just
round the corner, under the trees. She nodded and went off with her dog,
leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she had lightly
made--and with the awfully instructive sound of the word "delightful"
lingering in my ears.

Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate.