We don’t say any more; she sits down on a footstool with her head against my knee, and I just smooth it.  When the clocks strike ten through the house, she rises and I stand up.  I see that she has been crying quietly, poor lonely little soul.  I lift her off her feet and kiss her, and stammer out my sorrow at losing her, and she is gone.  Next morning the little maid brought me an envelope from the lady, who left by the first train.  It held a little grey glove; that is why I carry it always, and why I haunt the inn and never leave it for longer than a week; why I sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost of her presence always; dream of the spring to come with the May-fly on the wing, and the young summer when midges dance, and the trout are growing fastidious; when she will come to me across the meadow grass, through the silver haze, as she did before; come with her grey eyes shining to exchange herself for her little grey glove.

THE WOMAN BEATER

By Israel Zangwill

(The Grey Wig/Stories and Novelettes, New York:  The Macmillan Company, 1903)

I

She came ‘to meet John Lefolle’, but John Lefolle did not know he was to meet Winifred Glamorys.  He did not even know he was himself the meeting-point of all the brilliant and beautiful persons, assembled in the publisher’s Saturday Salon, for although a youthful minor poet, he was modest and lovable.  Perhaps his Oxford tutorship was sobering.  At any rate his head remained unturned by his precocious fame, and to meet these other young men and women—­his reverend seniors on the slopes of Parnassus—­gave him more pleasure than the receipt of ‘royalties’.  Not that his publisher afforded him much opportunity of contrasting the two pleasures.  The profits of the Muse went to provide this room of old furniture and roses, this beautiful garden a-twinkle with Japanese lanterns, like gorgeous fire-flowers blossoming under the white crescent-moon of early June.

Winifred Glamorys was not literary herself.  She was better than a poetess, she was a poem.  The publisher always threw in a few realities, and some beautiful brainless creature would generally be found the nucleus of a crowd, while Clio in spectacles languished in a corner.  Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and witcheries, and, assuredly, flitting in her white gown through the dark balmy garden, she seemed the very spirit of moonlight, the subtle incarnation of night and roses.

When John Lefolle met her, Cecilia was with her, and the first conversation was triangular.  Cecilia fired most of the shots; she was a bouncing, rattling beauty, chockful of confidence and high spirits, except when asked to do the one thing she could do—­sing!  Then she became—­quite genuinely—­a nervous, hesitant, pale little thing.  However, the suppliant hostess bore her off, and presently her rich contralto notes passed through the garden, adding to its passion and mystery, and through the open French windows, John could see her standing against the wall near the piano, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed, her creamy throat swelling in the very abandonment of artistic ecstasy.