"I shouldn't." This was cryptic. But I was aware that it was advisable to give her a little rope. So I held my peace and found another hole. And presently she added, "When a woman's heart is breaking she sometimes does go mad." "Hetty!" I had been giving utterance to my sentiments on the subject of the importance which love plays in human lives; I think I got them from Byron. Hetty had been scoffing. I suspected her of paraphrasing my words with mischievous intention. But it seemed that she was actually in earnest. "You talk about love wrecking people's lives, as if you know anything at all about it; I saw that paper-covered Byron in your workbox--and you can't see what's taking place underneath your very eyes." "Hetty, what do you mean?" "Poor Miss Frazer!" She sighed, actually. Or she emitted a sound which appeared to me to be a sigh. A light dawned on me. "You don't mean--you don't mean that you think that she's in love?" Miss Frazer was short, square, and squat. Sandy-haired, with not much of that. Short-sighted, her spectacles would not keep straight owing to the absence of a bridge on her abbreviated nose. Freckled, you might have been able to stick a pin between some of the freckles, but I doubt it. To me, then, she seemed ancient; but I suppose she was about forty. And, considering her general appearance and style of figure, she had a most unfortunate fondness for Scotch plaids. Up to that moment my sentimentalism had been all theory. I had not associated the tender passion with Miss Frazer. It was left for Hetty to direct my theoretical sympathy into a practical channel. "Do I think? No, I do not think." "Do you know that she's in love?" "I know nothing. I want to know nothing. I will know nothing. But with you, who are always talking, it is different." "Hetty, if you don't tell me what you mean, I--I--I'll throw my shoe at you." "Throw away. You never hit anything you aimed at yet." She went on calmly brushing her hair, as if she had not made me all over pins and needles. Presently she gave utterance to an observation which was Sphinx-like in its mystery: "A Frenchman thinks no more of breaking an Englishwoman's heart than--than of eating his breakfast." "Hetty! what do you mean?" "Ask Monsieur Doumer." Monsieur Doumer! Ask Monsieur Doumer! Why, M. Doumer was our French master, as unromantic-looking an example of the one sex as Miss Frazer was of the other. He was immensely stout, perfectly bald-headed, with cheeks and skin which looked as if they were covered with iron-mould, because he never shaved them. That anything feminine could regard with equanimity the prospect of being brought within measurable distance of that scrubby countenance did seem incredible. And yet here was Hetty hinting. "Do you mean to say that Miss Frazer's in love with M. Doumer?" "You say yourself that she seems to be going mad." "Yes; but I don't quite see what that has to do with it." "Not when a woman's being trampled on?"