Old times used this phrase unscientifically; "understanding women" has acquired misleading connotations. The words seem to call up the picture of a purely gallant observer, one with a polished mustache and amorous gay eyes, sitting under a sidewalk awning and ogling out over a purplish drink. We may go so far as to state plainly that they call up the picture of a Frenchman. The young man at the table is scarcely imagined as this sort of authority, viewing Woman crudely as La Femme. As he could not put pencil to paper without revealing, Charles Garrott viewed Woman, never as La Femme, but exclusively as a Question. Himself the New Man obviously, he saw Woman solely as a Movement, meditated about her strictly as an Unrest. When he considered her in the concrete--and that he seldom did nowadays, if we need not count his friend, Mary Wing, who was as New as he, to say the least of it--his eye reviewed and criticized her, not as a Sex, but strictly as a human being against an environment. Charles Garrott would scientifically diagnose a Woman to her face, in a manner which she, poor creature, but little suspected. Romance [he began again] left us with the sentimental tradition that a w---- "Charles!" said his relative and secretary, speaking for the first time in ten minutes, a long silence for him--"I'll thank you for your attention a moment." "Certainly, Judge," said Charles Garrott, with that alacrity with which a true writer habitually welcomes an interruption. "Here, near the end of this story--passage I can't for the life of me.... Here! Seems to go like this: 'Let a man,' cried Dionysius, cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness, 'but free his eyes from the magic of sex, and mask my words'--no!--let's see--'_mark_ my words, Bishop, he shall see strange truths.'" There was a pause. "Mistake somewhere!" said the gentleman at the typewriter, with a chuckle. "Well, what's what?" "No, that's right, I believe. Why, what's the matter with it?" "Why!--there's no sense in it!" "Oh--it's advanced talk, you know. Modern, epigrammatic stuff, you might call it." "Conceding that, here's the bit about the nuts. That's where the mistake is, _I_ claim. Let me see--'cracking walnuts with a sort of _splendid_ sadness.' Good gad,--that can't be right, Charles! 'Sober sadness,' 'sorrowful sadness'--something of that sort you meant, eh?" The secretary had swung about suddenly, revealing a face almost startlingly handsome, fine-cut as a cameo, pink and white as a professional beauty's, and topped with a magnificent crown of snow-white hair. "'Pathetic sadness,' now, my dear fellow? Go just a little better, wouldn't it?" "Well--no, Judge, not just in this particular story. Fact is, it's meant to be a little queer, you see." "It _is_ queer, that's my point!" said the Judge, rather worried. "'Cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness'--if the public understands _that_!--Well, as you like, of course."