ded more like threats,--and as he
spoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and
heard savage trumpetings of masculine monsters without a name.

I told him so.

"You are," I said,--"and you will forgive my directness of
expression,--you are the Primeval Male! You are the direct descendant
of those Romans who carried off the Sabine women. Nay! you have a much
longer genealogy. You come of those hairy anthropoid males who hunted
their mates through the tangle of primeval forests, and who finally
obtained their consent--shall we say?--by clubbing them on the head
with a stone axe. You talk a great deal of nonsense about the New
Woman, but you, Sir, are THE OLD MALE; and," I continued, "I have only
to obtain your wife's consent to take her under my protection this
instant."

Curiously enough, "The Old Male," as he is now affectionately called,
became from this moment quite a bosom friend. Nothing would satisfy us
but that we should all lodge at the same pension together, and there
many a day we fought our battles over again. But that poor little wife
never, to my knowledge, went to the Cafe d'Harcourt again.

CHAPTER XIII

THE INNOCENCE OF PARIS

This meeting with William and Dora was fortunate from the point of view
of my studies; for that very night, as I dined with them en pension, I
found that providence, with his usual foresight, had placed me next to
a very charming American girl of the type that I was particularly
wishful to study. She seemed equally wishful to be studied, and we got
on amazingly from the first moment of our acquaintance. By the middle
of dinner we were pressing each other's feet under the table, and when
coffee and cigarettes had come, we were affianced lovers. "Why should
I blush to own I love?" was evidently my quaint little companion's
motto; and indeed she didn't blush to own it to the whole table, and
publicly to announce that I was the dearest boy, and absolutely the
most lovable man she had met. There was nothing she wouldn't do for
me. Would she brave the terrors of the Latin Quarter with me, I asked,
and introduce me to the terrible Cafe d'Harcourt, about which William
and Dora had suffered such searchings of heart? "Why, certainly; there
was nothing in that," she said. So we went.

Nothing is more absurd and unjust than those crude labels of national
character which label one country virtuous and another vicious, one
musical and another liter