edge why so
futile a thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally
self-appointed and fantastic task.

But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that if it
had not been for Barbara I should write of these things with
half-knowledge. Sex is a queer and incalculable solvent of human
confidence. There are certain revelations that men will make only to a
man, certain revelations likewise that women will make only to a man. On
the other hand, a woman is told things by her sister women and her
brother men which, but for her, would never reach a man's ears. So by
combining the information obtained from our family encyclopaedia under
the feminine heading of China with that obtained under the masculine
heading of Philosophy, I can, figuratively speaking, like the famous
student, issue my treatise on Chinese Philosophy.

* * * * *

One miraculous morning in late May, not so very many years ago, when the
parrot-tulips in my garden were expanding themselves wantonly to the
sun, and the lilac and laburnum which I caught, as I sat at my table,
with the tail of one eye, and the pink may which I caught with the tail
of the other, bloomed in splendid arrogance, my quiet outlook on
greenery and colour was obscured by a human form. I may mention that my
study-table is placed in the bay of a window, on the ground floor. It is
a French window, opening on a terrace. Beyond the parapet of the
terrace, the garden, with its apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its
lawn, its beds of tulips, its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts
of other pleasant things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron
railings separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow,
when she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious cow.
Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I digress. . . .

I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife. She
looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair _blond
comme les bles_, and her mocking cornflower blue eyes, and her mutinous
mouth, which has never yet (after all these years) assumed a responsible
parent's austerity. She wore a fresh white dress with coquettish bits of
blue about the bodice. In her hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper,
the _Daily Telegraph_, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.

"Am I dist