“She wasn’t a bad woman, mind you—­merely given to fits of temper.  At times she could be quite pleasant:  but when she wasn’t life with her must have been exciting.  He had stood it for about seven years; and then one day, without a word of warning to anyone, he went away and left her.  As she was quite able to keep herself, this seemed to be the best arrangement possible, and everybody wondered why he had never thought of it before, I did not see him again for nine months, until I ran against him by pure chance on the Koln platform, where I was waiting for a train to Paris.  He told me they had made up all their differences by correspondence, and that he was then on his way back to her.  He seemed quite cheerful and expectant.

“‘Do you think she’s really reformed?’ I says.  ’Do you think nine months is long enough to have taught her a lesson?’ I didn’t want to damp him, but personally I have never known but one case of a woman being cured of nagging, and that being brought about by a fall from a third-story window, resulting in what the doctors called permanent paralysis of the vocal organs, can hardly be taken as a precedent.

“‘No,’ he answers, ’nor nine years.  But it’s been long enough to teach me a lesson.’

“‘You know me,’ he goes on.  ’I ain’t a quarrelsome sort of chap.  If nobody says a word to me, I never says a word to anybody; and it’s been like that ever since I left her, day in and day out, all just the same.  Up in the morning, do your bit of work, drink your glass of beer, and to bed in the evening; nothing to excite you, nothing to rouse you.  Why, it’s a mere animal existence.’

“He was a rum sort of chap, always thought things out from his own point of view as it were.”

“Yes, a curious case,” I remarked to Henry; “not the sort of story to put about, however.  It might give women the idea that nagging is attractive, and encourage them to try it upon husbands who do not care for that kind of excitement.”

“Not much fear of that,” replied Henry.  “The nagging woman is born, as they say, not made; and she’ll nag like the roses bloom, not because she wants to, but because she can’t help it.  And a woman to whom it don’t come natural will never be any real good at it, try as she may.  And as for the men, why we’ll just go on selecting wives according to the old rule, so that you never know what you’ve got till it’s too late for you to do anything but make the best or the worst of it, according as your fancy takes you.

“There was a fellow,” continued Henry, “as used to work with me a good many years ago now at a small hotel in the City.  He was a waiter, like myself—­not a bad sort of chap, though a bit of a toff in his off-hours.  He’d been engaged for some two or three years to one of the chambermaids.  A pretty, gentle-looking little thing she was, with big childish eyes, and a voice like the pouring out of water.  They are strange