"Women! ay, women! man's curse. At the end of the race they beat us always. We get one soft spot with our mother's milk, and well they know it, well they know it. What a man I would have been [a rising growl] if it hadn't been for women! Do you hear, you white-faced spawn? Yes, I mean it. God! when I look back--But [chuckling] I paid them out, the brutes!" And curse follows curse, and worse than that; as from the lips of the stepdaughter in the fairy tale, the words that drop from his lips are the toads and vipers of filth. "If one could forget! There was one, one long ago,--I might have spared her; she pleaded hard against me. Why do I think of her to-night? It is years, years ago. Ah, but I was big and beautiful in those days! She, she was an innocent little thing. I fascinated her like a snake, and I can see her eyes. They were blue, with long lashes. _I can see them now_, curse them! She and the child, gibbering idiots both! Oh [groan], curses on you for a devil, to plague me thus! Keep away! I say, keep away! How the ghosts dance about the room! There is another one I had forgotten. Light more candles, more! [a shriek] more! I say, all round the room! make a damn wake of it!" Mutter, mutter,--a sourdine epic of Hades. She closes her eyes. The stick whirls past her, striking a vase off a table near her; she gets up, hands it to him without a word. He hiccoughs and laughs; and then he heaves one sob, and cries bitterly, with the great tears gushing forth in jets. She picks up his handkerchief and puts it into his hand, and he looks at her with a piteous softening of his wild eyes; and he says quietly, hiccoughing all the while like a child tired after a fit of passion,--for man in all his passions has a little of the inconsequent child; it is only woman who sins with clear seeing,-- "I am a brute, I know it; but you don't know what it is to see the ghosts of sins stirring in a man's soul like maggots in a dead rat. And the children, that is the worst of all. Oh, God! my poor little girls! What will become of them? Oh, oh!" "But you settled for them!" soothing with her weary voice. "But you settled for them all right!"