over. Put him on a battlefield with guns going
off in all directions, or in a shipwreck, or in the midst of a herd of
crocodiles, and he will be cool master of the situation, and will
telegraph to his newspaper the graphic, nervous stuff of the born
journalist; but set him a simple problem in social life, which a child
of fifteen would solve in a walk across the room, and he is scared to
death. Instead of sending for Barbara, for instance, when he arrived in
London, or any other sensible woman, say, like Frau von Hagen of
Cettinje, he drags poor Euphemia, a timid maiden lady of forty-five,
from her tea-parties and Bible-classes and Dorcas-meetings at Tunbridge
Wells, and plants her down as guide, philosopher and friend to this
disconcerting product of Chicago and Albania. Of course the poor lady
was at her wits' ends, not knowing whether to treat her as a new-born
baby or a buffalo. With equal inevitability, Liosha, unaccustomed to
this type of Western woman, summed her up in a drastic epithet. And in
the meanwhile Jaffery went about tearing hair and beard and cursing the
fate that put him in charge of a volcano in petticoats.

"I have a great regard for Euphemia," said Barbara, later in the
day--they were walking up and down the terrace in, the dusk before
dinner--"but I have some sympathy with Liosha. Tolstoi! My dear Jaffery!
And the City Temple! If she wanted to take the girl to church, why not
her own church, the Brompton Oratory or Farm Street?"

"Euphemia wouldn't attend a Popish place of worship--she still calls it
Popish, poor dear--to save her soul alive, or anybody else's soul,"
replied Jaffery.

"Then pack her off at once to Tunbridge Wells," said Barbara. "She's
even more helpless than you, which is saying a great deal. I'll see to
Liosha."

Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet of her, miraculous of her,
but he couldn't dream of it.

"Then don't," she retorted. "Put it out of your mind. And there's
Franklin. Come to dinner."

"I'm not a bit hungry," he said gloomily.

We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly. Liosha, who sat on
my right, refreshingly free in her table manners (embarrassingly so to
my most correct butler), was equally free in her speech. She provided me
with excellent entertainment. I learned many frank truths about Albanian
women, for whom, on account of their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed
the most scathing contempt. Her details, in architectural phrase, wer