pundits; the poetry of the
people is more subtle than science: it can never be held in check, and
it overcomes the obstacles which prove a stumbling-block to criticism.
By a happy turn of the imagination popular fancy has welded the two
Marys together and thus created the marvellous type of Mary Magdalen. It
has been made sacred by legend, and it is the legend which has inspired
my little story. In this I consider myself above reproach. Nor is that
all! I am able, even, to invoke the authority of the learned, and I
may, without vanity, say that the Sorbonne is on my side. The Sorbonne
declared on December 1, 1521, that there is but one Mary.

THE RED EGG

TO SAMUEL POZZI

Dr. N------ placed his coffee-cup on the mantelpiece, threw his cigar
into the fire, and said to me: "My dear friend, you recently told me of
the strange suicide of a woman tortured by terror and remorse. Her
nature was fine and she was exquisitely cultivated. Being suspected of
complicity in a crime of which she had been the silent witness, in
despair at her own irreparable cowardice, she was haunted by a perpetual
nightmare in which her husband appeared to her dead and decomposing and
pointing her out with his finger to the inquisitive magistrates. She was
the victim of her own morbid imagination. In this condition an
insignificant and casual circumstane decided her fate.

"Her nephew, a child, lived with her. One morning he was, as usual,
studying his lessons in the dining-room where she happened to be. The
child began to translate word by word a verse of Sophocles, and as he
wrote he pronounced aloud both the Greek and the translation:

[Illustration: Greek phrases 100]

The head divine; of Jocasta; is dead.... tearing her hair; she calls;
Laios dead... we see; the woman hung. He added a flourish which tore
the paper, stuck out his ink-stained tongue, and repeated in sing-song,
'Hung, hung, hung!'

"The wretched woman, whose will-power had been destroyed, passively
obeyed the suggestion in the word, repeated three times. She rose, and
without a word or look went straight to her room. Some hours later
the police-inspector, called to verify a violent death, made this
reflection: 'I have seen many women who have committed suicide, but this
is the first time I have seen one who has hanged herself.'

"We speak of suggestion. Here is an instance which is at once natural
and credible. I am a little doubtful, i