y were getting on. I
took a letter with me to register. It had an unusually long address. The
registering woman began copying the address on the receipt form, in a
business-like manner cheering and delightful to see. Half way through, a
little child-sister of one of the other women employed trotted into the
office, and popped under the counter to go and speak to her relative.
The registering woman's mind instantly gave way. Her pencil stopped; her
eyes wandered off to the child with a charming expression of interest.
'Well, Lucy,' she said, 'how d'ye do?' Then she remembered business
again, and returned to her receipt. When I took it across the counter,
an important line in the address of my letter was left out in the copy.
Thanks to Lucy. Now a man in the same position would not have seen
Lucy--he would have been too closely occupied with what he was about
at the moment. There is the whole difference between the mental
constitution of the sexes, which no legislation will ever alter as long
as the world lasts! What does it matter? Women are infinitely superior
to men in the moral qualities which are the true adornments of humanity.
Be content--oh, my mistaken sisters, be content with that!"

He twisted his chair around toward the stove. It was useless to dispute
the question with him, even if I had felt inclined to do so. He absorbed
himself in his stew-pan.

I looked about me in the room.

The same insatiable relish for horrors exhibited downstairs by the
pictures in the hall was displayed again here. The photographs hanging
on the wall represented the various forms of madness taken from the
life. The plaster casts ranged on the shelf opposite were casts (after
death) of the heads of famous murderers. A frightful little skeleton
of a woman hung in a cupboard, behind a glazed door, with this cynical
inscription placed above the skull: "Behold the scaffolding on which
beauty is built!" In a corresponding cupboard, with the door wide
open, there hung in loose folds a shirt (as I took it to be) of chamois
leather. Touching it (and finding it to be far softer than any chamois
leather that my fingers had ever felt before), I disarranged the folds,
and disclosed a ticket pinned among them, describing the thing in these
horrid lines: "Skin of a French Marquis, tanned in the Revolution of
Ninety-three. Who says the nobility are not good for something? They
make good leather."

After this last specimen of my host's taste in