"Pooh!" I cried. "And he calls himself a lover!" "_All_ men aren’t like Baffin and other people, thank goodness," said James disdainfully. "Mr. Grimsdick thinks about the future. But I’d rather go in for rats, I think. There’s Baffin, for instance: he never shuts a door after him." "Rats don’t either," I submitted. "But cats don’t open them," argued James, not without logic. "And then there’s always having to be at home on the second Tuesday. Really, I can’t decide about my future at all. Most girls haven’t any difficulties, because they can make up their minds to be nurses and relieve the sufferings of the poor. But I’ve been brought up to that sort of thing, and it bores me. Of course, you can always get an opium-eater, or drunkard, or something, and devote your life to reforming him. But then, again, they always smell of it. Really, it’s very hard. And Baffin’s so irritable. Look at the way men fuss over trifles. And if you get one who is clean and not fussy, and not a grocer, and decently young, he is sure to be ugly and a bore." I said, "You are referring now, I suppose, to Boag, the Conative Meliorist?" "No," replied James. "Mr. Boag is a bore, but he isn’t downright ugly. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of _you_." "Oh!" I said. "Yes," said James. "I know you like one to be frank. Apart from everything else, men make me sick. It will really have to be rats." *XXVI* *THE APRIL BARGE* I set out, sedately enough, one April morning, to rescue James from her aunt at Bayswater. I set out grandly enthroned upon a ’bus. But I came quite unexpectedly upon this April Barge, and James and her aunt were forgotten. The April sun had come out sharp to time, you see, and was winking fitfully upon all of us, like the unsettled, rakish fellow that he is. And a girl with two great baskets full of wondering daffodils had come out, too; and some conscienceless vagabond was extracting melody from a cornet. So that even the Regent’s Canal, with its sombre vicinage and sulky craft, seemed, as if by some surprising effort, to have taken on an air of sweetness and youth and hope. You could consider this fact at leisure as our ’bus toiled slowly up the rise of a road which spans the canal. There was a public-house in front of us—the public-house and the cornet seem to be inseparably united in this neighbourhood—but the canal was to one’s left, and appeared, somehow, to convey that air of refreshment which the tavern so conspicuously lacked.