I cannot think a promiscuous domesticity desirable, and am one of those who strongly disapprove of that worst example of it, the mixed bathing or _Familienbad_ which blots with practically unclothed Jews of either sex our otherwise decent coasts. Never have I allowed Edelgard to indulge in it, nor have I done so myself. It is a deplorable spectacle. We used to sit and watch it for hours, in a condition of ever-increasing horror and disgust--it was quite difficult to find seats sometimes, so many of our friends were there being disgusted too. But these denizens of the deep at the points where the deep was a _Familienbad_ were, as I have said, chiefly Jews and their Jewesses, and what can you expect? Jellaby, however, in spite of his other infirmities, was not yet a Jew; he was everything else I think, but that crowning infamy had up to then been denied him. But not to be one and yet to behave with the laxness of one within view of the rest of the party was very inexcusable. “Are there no hedges to this field?” I cried in indignant sarcasm, looking pointedly at each of its four hedges in turn and raising my voice so that he could hear. “Oh, Baron dear, it’s Sunday,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, no longer a rather nice-looking if irreverent cameo in a velvet case, but full of morning militancy. “Don’t be cross till to-morrow. Save it up, or what will you do on Monday?” “Be, I trust, just as capable of distinguishing between the permitted and the non-permitted as I am to-day,” was my ready retort. “Oh, oh,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, shaking her head and smiling as though she were talking to a child or a feeble-minded; and turning her camera on to me she took my photograph. “Pray why,” I inquired with justifiable heat, “should I be photographed without my consent?” “Because,” she said, “you look so deliciously cross. I want to have you in my scrap-book like that. You looked then exactly like a baby I know.” “Which baby?” I asked, frowning and at a loss how to meet this kind of thing conversationally. And there was Edelgard, all ears; and if a wife sees her husband being treated disrespectfully by other women is it not very likely that she soon will begin to treat him so herself? “Which baby?” I asked; but knew myself inadequate. “Oh, a perfectly respectable baby,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh carelessly, putting her camera down and going on with her breakfast, “but irritable and exacting about things like bottles.” “But I do not see what I have to do with bottles,” I said nettled. “Oh, no--you haven’t. Only it looks at its nurse just like you did then if they’re late, or not full enough.” “But I did not look at its nurse,” I said angrily, becoming still more so as they all (including my wife) laughed. I rose abruptly. “I will go and smoke,” I said.