But anyone will do as well as a doctor; a clergyman or a lover if they will take an interest in one’s soul. I believe that a chiropodist who was really concerned for one’s toes would fill a long-felt want. It is a curious fact that no one goes to a lawyer for sympathy, and yet why we suppose that abnormalities in our liver will make us interesting in the eyes of a doctor to whom livers are no treat, while we neglect our lawyers who will investigate disorders in our conduct for the moderate sum of six-and-eightpence, must remain a mystery. Suppose that one of us went to a solicitor’s office and said: “Do you know, such a queer thing has happened to me! I went and burgled a poor old gentleman the other day--stole his watch and a lot of valuable plate--and outside I met a policeman, whom I drugged with chloroform on a handkerchief.” One imagines the solicitor gravely investigating the matter, finding no old gentleman, no watch, no stolen plate, and no policeman. He charges the usual fee, puts a pair of handcuffs on the lady, and tells her to come back in a fortnight and have them altered. A doctor whom I love very much once made this startling remark to me: “You lead a very nice life for a lady.” The words brought to my mind such pictures as I have never forgotten. Such vistas of flat, dull landscape stretched before me; such dead seas of sensible conversation; such mountains made of interminable molehills; such continents of golf links and tennis lawns. All the shores were strewn with correctly balanced account books and the _débris_ of tea parties; the trees were hung with carefully selected and well-boiled legs of mutton; first-rate parlourmaids with slight moustaches who understood the telephone peeped from behind every bush, and family butchers mated on St. Valentine’s Day in the place of nightingales. The sky was made of chill-proof Jaeger, and the stars were all turned so that their light fell from behind and on the left side of the book. My thoughts took the form of a parody on Lear’s poem about the Jumblies: _Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live; Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals are like a sieve._ The last line will not bear analysis, but I think that the word “ladies” as he used it gave me an impression of something that lets the juice of life escape and retains only a few husks and skins. A very nice life for a lady seemed to me little more than a very nice tissue of habits, but then, no words mean quite the same thing to any two people. _CHAPTER VIII_: CHILDREN