the same predicament, having only, at the moment, for all tobacco, the pipe
I was then smoking. "For God's sake, like a good chap, give me a puff or
two," she pleaded. And so we walked on through the rain and mud, she pipe
in mouth, her shoulders hunched, her hands, under the scornfully hitched up
skirt, deep in her breeches pockets. And now, this summer morning, there
she lay, all woman, insidiously, devilishly alluring woman, almost
voluptuous in her self-confident abandonment to the fundamental conception
of feminine existence.

Lackaday's eyes rested on her admiringly. He did not reply to her remark,
until she added in a bantering tone:

"Tell me."

Then he said, with an air of significance: "The most genuine brand you can
imagine, I assure you."

"A motley fool," she suggested idly.

At that moment, Evadne, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house, who,
as she told me soon afterwards, in the idiom of her generation, had given
the divine-services a miss, carried me off to see a litter of Sealyham
puppies. That inspection over, we reviewed rabbits and fetched a compass
round about the pigsties and crossed the orchard to the chicken's parade,
and passed on to her own allotment in the kitchen garden, where a few
moth-eaten cabbages and a wilting tomato in a planted pot seemed to hang
degraded heads at our approach, and, lingering through the rose garden, we
eventually emerged on the further side of the lawn.

"I suppose you want to go and join them," she said with a jerk of her