My friend was not so entangled and had escaped on the other side. She noticed his walk. "Oh, don't _you_ get up," she said. "_This_ gentleman," she indicated my convulsive struggles to free myself, "will do that. _I did not see that you were a cripple._" It may be some of my readers will recognise the lady now. It can be--for the honour of womankind--only one woman. She is an atavism, a survival of the age of violence, a Palaeolithic squaw in petticoats. I do not know her name and address or I would publish it. I do not care if she kills me the next time she meets me, for the limits of endurance have been passed. If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's peace. And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady, more than half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly ill-treating a little costermonger. If it was not she it was certainly her sister, and I do not care who knows it. What to do with her I do not know. A League, after all, seems ineffectual; she would break up any League. I have thought of giving her in charge for assault, but I shrink from the invidious publicity of that. Still, I am in grim earnest to do something. I think at times that the compulsory adoption of a narrow doorway for churches and places of public entertainment might be some protection for quiet, inoffensive people. How she would rage outside to be sure! Yet that seems a great undertaking. But this little paper is not so much a plan of campaign as a preliminary defiance. Life is a doubtful boon while one is never safe from assault, from hitting and shoving, from poking with umbrellas, being sat upon, and used as a target for projectile nephews and nieces. I warn her--possibly with a certain quaver in my voice--that I am in revolt. If she hits me again----I will not say the precise thing I will do, but I warn her, very solemnly and deliberately, that she had better not hit me again. And so for the present the matter remains. THE SHOPMAN If I were really opulent, I would not go into a shop at all--I would have a private secretary. If I were really determined, Euphemia would do these things. As it is, I find buying things in a shop the most exasperating of all the many trying duties of life. I am sometimes almost tempted to declare myself Adamite to escape it. The way the shopman eyes you as you enter his den, the very spread of his fingers, irritate me. "What can I have the pleasure?" he says, bowing forward at me, and with his eye on my chin--and so waits.