three sexes, men, women and people who pity. _It is said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb. Let us play._ He is laughing in a laboriously aesthetic way. He is pulling the nineteenth century’s leg, but the twentieth century can pull his. It is all Victorian smart like a minor novelist’s club. Affectations of an out-of-date “deliciously naughty fellow.” Written for sheltered women. _The real genius for love lies not in getting into but getting out of love._ All right. But does the word love catch every woman’s eye as it catches mine? _Pythons.... Persian cats...._ Are men then really so naïve? No woman would bother to retail such Garden Suburb vice. Or do I not understand the joke? Yes, I know he wrote it when he was young. But he re-published it when he was old. Has he not noticed what has happened to the world since he wrote it? It is re-published in fun ... as a survival. If I were cleverer I would have been laughing all along. But it is proud of its Bohemianism. The game of being a Bohemian can only be played with a smiling mind. You can’t have a smiling mind among Pythons and Persian cats. No—_Hypocritical reader, in telling you of my vices I am only telling you of your own, in showing you my soul I am only showing you your own._ When he talks of readers and souls and vices like that he is using a dead language. The reader he apostrophizes is dead. He has the sustained smirk of a John Leech “Toff.” He is an inverted Pollyanna. Now I am in America. We don’t pretend now. We don’t leer. When we leer we see ourselves in the glass now.’ Tam McTab said, “By Jove, Emily, you ought to be shot. You are terrifying. You are too conscious, you frighten one.” “Tam, do I frighten you? Tam, say quickly, do I frighten you?” “Not so much as you might,” he said. “Because we are all somehow metallically unsimple in these days. I am too. We can’t even be naked without noticing it. We can’t even think without thinking about thinking. But you are too unsimple to be allowed to live, really. It is simple and human to pose a bit and not to know you are posing. When you try to know yourself so well you devastate yourself. You are conspicuously inhuman even in an inhuman age. You are too hard-hearted to have delusions and to make mistakes and love yourself peacefully as everyone else does. If you hit nails on the head you do it savagely, with a purpose, and kill something with it—as Jael did.” It was suddenly apparent that Emily was crying, but she made no sound and said no word. Her eyes looked round and strained and the firelight caught the tears on her lower lashes. “Is that a bird calling?” asked Lucy mildly. Lucy’s cindery hand was nervously poking the fire with a twig. Information was generally left for Rhoda to give. “It is not a bird. It is a man whistling.” The firelight glared suddenly and cast all their shadows outward in a circle. Their shadows were like the petals of a dark flower with a flaming centre.