"It's excitement of rather a dangerous order," he remarked slowly.

"I shall never be likely to forget that I am an Englishman," Julien
said. "Perhaps I may be able to do something to set matters right
again. One can't tell. By the bye, Kendricks," he went on, "do you
remember when we were at college how you hated women? How you used to
try and trace half the things that went wrong in life to their
influence?"

The journalist nodded. He knocked the ashes from his pipe deliberately.

"I was a boy in those days," he declared. "I am a man now, getting on
toward middle age, and on that one subject I am as rabid as ever. I
hate their meddling in men's affairs, shoving themselves into politics,
always whispering in a man's ear under pretence of helping him with
their sympathy. They're in evidence wherever you go--women, women,
women! The place reeks with them. You can't go about your work, hour by
hour or day by day, without having them on every side of you. It's like
a poison, this trail of them over every piece of serious work we
attempt, over every place we find our way into. They bang the
typewriters in our offices, they elbow us in the streets, they smile at
us from the next table at our workaday luncheon, they crowd the tubes
and the cars and the cabs in the streets. Why the deuce, Julien, can't
we treat them like those sage Orientals, and dump them all in one place
where they belong till we've finished our work?"

Julien lifted his tumbler of whiskey and soda to his lips and set it
down empty.

"In a way, you're right, Kendricks," he agreed. "You go too far, of