involuntarily reverts to another little lady he once knew, who, while she couldn't tell the difference between a sonnet and a cabriolet, and had a dim notion when she heard people speaking of Keats that keats were some sort of a shellfish found on the rocks of the Hebrides at low tide, and much relished by the natives, could yet put together a tea biscuit so delicately tenuous of character that it melted in the mouth like a flake of snow on the smokestack of a Pittsburgh blast furnace. Thus an apparently secured joy loses its keen edge, and without anybody being really to blame, life becomes thenceforward, very gradually, but none the less surely, a mere test of endurance--a domestic marathon which must be run to the end, unless the runners collapse before reaching the finish." "For both parties!" snapped the Landlady, pursing her lips severely. "You needn't think that the men are the only ones to suffer--don't you fool yourself on that point." "Oh, indeed I don't, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "It's just as bad for the woman as for the man--sometimes a little worse, for there is no denying that women are after all more chameleonic, capable of a greater variety of emotions than men are. A man may find several women in one--in fact, he generally does. It is her frequent unlikeness to herself that constitutes the chief charm of some women. Take my friend Spinks' wife, for instance. She's the most exacting Puritan at home that you ever met. Poor Spinksy has to toe a straight mark for at least sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. Mrs. Spinks rules him with a rod of iron, but when that little Puritan goes to a club dance--well, believe me, she is the snappiest eyed, most flirtatious little tangoer in ninety-seven counties. Sundays in church she is the demurest bit of sartorial impressiveness in sight, but at the bridge table you want to keep your eyes wide open all the time lest your comfortable little balance at the bank be suddenly transformed into a howling overdraft. I should say that on general principles Mrs. Spinks is not less than nine or ten women, all rolled into one--Joan of Arc, Desdemona, Lucrezia Borgia, Cleopatra, Nantippe, Juliet, Mrs. Pankhurst, Eve, and the late Carrie Nation. But Spinks--poor old Spinksy--there's no infinite variety about him. At most Spinks is only two men--Mr. Henpeck at home and Mr. Overworked when he gets out."