"I ran right into trouble, you know, this time. Somehow or other, I'd forgotten Rosa. I didn't simply not try to avoid him, I waited for him to come up. It seemed only the right and proper thing. He came up, lifting his cap. He'd bought a suit of clothes and a pair of those long-toed foreign boots, but he still had the old cap I'd given him. Those clothes fitted him well, I remember, but he was a well-made man and easy to fit. The coat had a waist to it, and he was a fine figure of a man as he came up. "I got a sort of panic at the moment he spoke. 'I'll see you to-morrow. I'll see you to-morrow,' I said, and tried to draw Rosa away. She looked at me in surprise. 'Who is it?' she asked me in Italian. 'Never mind,' I said. 'Come away.' 'I'll see you to-morrow.' "'Why, Charley!' he says. 'You aren't going away without introducing me, surely.' "I was in a cleft stick. All of a sudden the memory of what he had done with Gladys had rushed over me. I pulled Rosa away. 'To-morrow,' I kept saying to Frank. 'See you to-morrow.' He didn't understand, apparently; kept up with us, his lottery tickets in his hand, trying to look into Rosa's face, and she hanging back looking at him. In this way we came up to the _Verdi_ doors, and I started to go in. "Women are obstinate sometimes. Rosa kept looking at him as he walked beside her, and before we were inside the vestibule he had explained that it was strange I wouldn't introduce him, seeing we were brothers. She looked at me. I couldn't deny he was my brother. All I could do was to say, 'Go away, Frank, go away!' But he didn't go away. He stood beside us in the crowd in the vestibule looking down at us, laughing, and talking, absolutely at his ease. As usual he was putting me in wrong before some one I knew. 'Why,' he says, 'even that silly blue-nosed old bounder of a captain of yours has given me a good character. Come on, Charley, be a sport. 'Pon my soul, Charley, I never knew you were much of a man with the girls. Sly old dog, eh? Going to sea all this time and spotting all the hot-house fruit, eh?' "'Frank,' I said, 'this lady is my future wife.' "He fell away from us in his surprise, looked from Rosa to me and back again, quick, like a bird, and then burst into a roar of laughter. "My brother Frank is one of those men who simply cannot believe in women. They honestly do not believe a virtuous woman exists. They strike you as vicious and coarse, these men, just when they are trying to be most charming. To my brother women were hot-house fruit. You can't blame such men altogether, because women themselves foster the idea. They act more like lunatics than sane people. Their heads are turned. No, you can't blame the men entirely.