rrent of dissension, "thank Heaven the
wretched composition's nearly finished."

On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her
offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine. Jaffery
met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the hour before
bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in which neither my
wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor myself were allowed to
participate. When nurses sounded the retreat, our two Brobdingnagians
appeared in the drawing-room, radiant, and dishevelled, with children
sticking to them like flies. It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side
of Jaffery, unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman
against physical man, with three children--two in her generous arms and
one on her back--to his mere pair--that I realised, with the shock that
always attends one's discovery of the obvious, the superb Olympian
greatness of the creature. She stood nearly six feet to his six feet
two. He stooped ever so little, as is the way of burly men. She held
herself as erect as a redwood pine. The depth of her bosom, in its calm
munificence, defied the vast, thick heave of his shoulders. Her lips
were parted in laughter shewing magnificent teeth. In her brown eyes one
could read all the mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood. Her
hair was anyhow: a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins.
Her barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt. I wanted, just
for the picture, half her bodice torn away. For there they stood, male
and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern garb. Clap a
pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight suit of chain mail,
moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his red sweeping moustache,
his red beard, his intense blue eyes staring out of a red face; dress
Liosha in flaming maize and purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a
gold torque through her hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under
autumn bracken; strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity--it
was an unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the Goetterdaemmerung.

I can only speak according to the impression produced by their entrance
on an idle, dilettante mind. My cousin Eileen, a smiling lady of plump
unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy, could not understand
it. Speaking entirely of physical attributes, she saw nothing more in
Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and considered Liosha far too b