game was.  It is wonderful what a lot can be learned from a single glance of the eyes.  When I saw the little boy bringing in the beer I felt that he had bested me.  But she brought me in a glass first, and putting her down on the sofa I scored first.  It was done so suddenly, so brutally, that, accustomed as she must have been to such scenes she turned red and bit her under lip.  But she sent the other man away in a few minutes.  After that she was insatiable; it was every day and sometimes twice in one day.  I commenced to be gloomy and miserable again.  And there was not even a pretense of love.  There was no deception about her; she even introduced me to Silenus and we made excursions together, for which he paid, as he had plenty of money.  We were always drinking, until at last I could eat nothing unless I had two or three whiskies.  I became very thin, my horizon seemed black and all things at an end. (But T.D. enjoyed his meals and was really fond of his wife and her boy and his work; life was pleasant to him.) She would go up to town with me and to a certain hotel; after drinking she would leave me waiting while she retired with the handsome young landlord for a short time.  She told me when she came back that he was a great favorite with married women.

    “She told me that Silenus visited a woman who practiced
    fellatio on him.  Mrs. D. thought such practices abominable and
    could not imagine how a woman could like doing such a thing.

“When she was out walking with me one day T.D.’s name came up and she said in a slightly altered voice:  ‘He told me he loved me!’ It was a word seldom used by her except in jest.  I threw a startled look at her and caught an inquisitive and apologetic look in return, such a strange and touching glance that I saw I had not yet understood her,—­there was an enigma somewhere.  When, bit by bit, she told me her life, I understood, or thought I understood, that strange childlike glance in this young woman steeped to her eyes in sin.  No one had ever made love to her or spoken to her of love in her life.

“It had commenced at school.  She must have been a particularly fine and handsome girl, judging from her photographs.  She had seen boys playing with girls’ privates under the form and felt jealous that they did not play with her’s.  She had no mother to look after her and she soon found plenty of boys to play with her, and young men, too, as she grew older.  She took it as she took her meals.  She had been really fond of her child’s father, but as he had shown no tenderness for her, nothing but a craving for sensual gratification, she would rather have died than let him know.  She soon tired of her attachments, she told me.  She did not like T.D.  He was not the complacent husband; he was spirited enough, but he believed everything she told him.  One day he came home unexpectedly when we were together on the bare palliass in her room.  It was