The brute was quiet for a moment, and under the circumstances I do think Edelgard might have helped. She knows I cannot bear dogs. If she had held his head I would not have minded going on holding his tail, and at home she would have made herself useful as a matter of course. Here, however, she did nothing of the sort, but stood tearing up a perfectly good, clean handkerchief into strips in order, forsooth, to render that assistance to Jellaby which she denied her own husband. I did take the dog by the collar, there being no other course open to me, and was thankful to find that he was too tired and too much hurt to do anything to me. But I have never been a dog lover, carefully excluding them from my flat in Storchwerder, and selling the one Edelgard had had as a girl and wanted to saddle me with on her marriage. I remember how long it took, she being then still composed of very raw material, to make her understand I had married her and not her _Dachshund_. Will it be believed that her only answer to my arguments was a repeated parrot-like cry of “But he is so sweet!” A feeble plea, indeed, to set against the logic of my reasons. She shed tears, I remember, in quantities more suited to fourteen than twenty-four (as I pointed out to her), but later on did acknowledge, in answer to my repeated inquiries, that the furniture and carpets were, no doubt, the better for it, though for a long time she had a tendency which I found some difficulty in repressing, to make tiresomely plaintive allusions to the fact that the buyer (I sold the dog by auction) had chanced to be a maker of sausages and she had not happened to meet the dog since in the streets. Also, until I spoke very seriously to her about it, for months she would not touch anything potted, after always having been particularly fond of this type of food. I soon found myself alone and unheeded with Jellaby’s dog, while Jellaby himself, the flattered centre of the entire body of ladies, was having his wound dressed. My wife washed it, Jumps held the bucket, Mrs. Menzies-Legh bound it up, Frau von Eckthum provided one of her own safety pins (I saw her take it out of her blouse), and Jane lent her sash for a sling. As for Lord Sigismund, after having seen to his own dog’s wounds (all made by Jellaby’s dog) he came back and, with truly Christian goodness, offered to wash and doctor Jellaby’s dog. His attitude, indeed, during these dog-fights was only one possible to a person of the very highest breeding. Never a word of reproach, yet it was clear that if Jellaby’s dog had not been there there would have been no fighting. And he exhibited a real distress over Jellaby’s wound, while Jellaby, thoroughly thick-skinned, laughed and declared he did not feel it; which, no doubt, was true, for that sort of person does not, I am convinced, feel anything like the same amount we others do.