s,
and no doubt there is a baby, or perhaps two babies, upstairs, and they
have finished her. How is such a woman to realise herself? How can she
work out her own salvation? What energies she has must be spent on her
children. And if ever she tries to think, she must fall asleep from
sheer torpor of brain. Now why should she be deprived of the use of her
soul?'

'Charlotte, are you not obscure? Here, take my pudding. I don't like
it.'

I hoped the pudding would stem the stream of her eloquence. I feared an
impending lecture. She had resumed the pamphlet manner of the previous
afternoon, and I felt very helpless. She took the pudding, and I was
dismayed, to find that though she ate it it had no effect whatever. She
did not even seem to know she was eating it, and continued to address me
with rapidly-increasing vehemence on the proper treatment of female
souls. Now why could she not talk on this subject without being
vehement? There is something about vehemence that freezes responsiveness
out of me; I suppose it is what Charlotte would call the oyster
characteristics coming out. Anyhow, by the time the waiter brought
cheese and woolly radishes and those wicked black slabs of leather
called _Pumpernickel_, I was sitting quite silent, and Charlotte was
leaning across the little table hurling fiery words at me. And as for
the stout lady who had set her ablaze, she ate almonds and raisins with
a sublime placidity, throwing the almonds down on to the stone floor,
cracking them with the heel of her boot, and exhibiting an unexpected
nimbleness in picking them up again.

'Do you suppose that if she hadn't had those four children and heaven
knows how many besides she wouldn't be different from what she is now?'
asked Charlotte, leaning her elbows on the table and fixing me with eyes
whose brightness dazzled me, 'As different as day is from night? As
health from disease? As briskness from torpor? She'd have looked and
felt ten years younger. She'd have had all her energies unimpaired.
She'd have had the use of her soul, her time, her individuality. Now it
is too late. All that has been choked out of her by the miserable daily
drudgery. What would the man, her smug husband there, say if he were
made to help in the soul-killing work a woman is expected to do as a
matter of course? Yet why shouldn't he help her bear her burdens? Why
shouldn't he take them on his stronger shoulders? Don't give me the
trite answer that it is becaus