yer repentance in doost an’ ashes.  Ay, Lord ’ull punish ye, Tony, chastize ye properly.  Ye’ll learn that marriage begun in sin can end in nought but sin.  Ay,’ she concluded, as she reached the door, raising her skinny hand prophetically, ‘ay, after I’m deed and gone, ye mind ye o’ t’ words o’ t’ apostle—­“For them that hev sinned without t’ law, shall also perish without t’ law."’

And she slammed the door behind her.

A LITTLE GREY GLOVE

By George Egerton (Mary Chavelita [Dunne] Bright)

(Keynotes, London:  Elkin Mathews and John Lane, Vigo Street, 1893)

Early-Spring, 1893

The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden and ends—­with Revelations.

OSCAR WILDE

Yes, most fellows’ book of life may be said to begin at the chapter where woman comes in; mine did.  She came in years ago, when I was a raw undergraduate.  With the sober thought of retrospective analysis, I may say she was not all my fancy painted her; indeed now that I come to think of it there was no fancy about the vermeil of her cheeks, rather an artificial reality; she had her bower in the bar of the Golden Boar, and I was madly in love with her, seriously intent on lawful wedlock.  Luckily for me she threw me over for a neighbouring pork butcher, but at the time I took it hardly, and it made me sex-shy.  I was a very poor man in those days.  One feels one’s griefs more keenly then, one hasn’t the wherewithal to buy distraction.  Besides, ladies snubbed me rather, on the rare occasions I met them.  Later I fell in for a legacy, the forerunner of several; indeed, I may say I am beastly rich.  My tastes are simple too, and I haven’t any poor relations.  I believe they are of great assistance in getting rid of superfluous capital, wish I had some!  It was after the legacy that women discovered my attractions.  They found that there was something superb in my plainness (before, they said ugliness), something after the style of the late Victor Emanuel, something infinitely more striking than mere ordinary beauty.  At least so Harding told me his sister said, and she had the reputation of being a clever girl.  Being an only child, I never had the opportunity other fellows had of studying the undress side of women through familiar intercourse, say with sisters.  Their most ordinary belongings were sacred to me.  I had, I used to be told, ridiculous high-flown notions about them (by the way I modified those considerably on closer acquaintance).  I ought to study them, nothing like a woman for developing a fellow.  So I laid in a stock of books in different languages, mostly novels, in which women played title roles, in order to get up some definite data before venturing amongst them.  I can’t say I derived much benefit from this course.  There seemed to be as great a diversity of opinion about the female species as, let us say, about the salmonidae.