“He is great, I grant you,” Chris would admit, “but vat is he if the vimmen leave him alone?  Divine yoost that.”  And he would proceed to cite endless examples of generals and statesmen whose wives or mistresses had been their bane.  Futile Edward’s attempts to shift the conversation to the subject of his own obsession; the German was by far the more aggressive, he would have none of it.  Perhaps if Edward had been willing to concede that the Bumpuses had been brought to their present lowly estate by the sinister agency of the fair sex Chris might conditionally have accepted the theme.  Hannah, contemptuously waving a tattered palm leaf fan, was silent; but on one occasion Janet took away the barber’s breath by suddenly observing:—­“You never seem to think of the women whose lives are ruined by men, Mr. Auermann.”

It was unheard-of, this invasion of a man’s argument by a woman, and by a young woman at that.  He glared at her through his spectacles, took them off, wiped them, replaced them, and glared at her again.  He did not like Janet; she was capable of what may be called a speaking silence, and he had never been wholly unaware of her disapproval and ridicule.  Perhaps he recognized in her, instinctively, the potential qualities of that emerging modern woman who to him was anathema.

“It is somethings I don’t think about,” he said.

He was a wizened little man with faience-blue eyes, and sat habitually hunched up with his hands folded across his shins.

“Nam fuit ante Helenam”—­as Darwin quotes.  Toward all the masculine residents of Fillmore Street, save one, the barber’s attitude was one of unconcealed scorn for an inability to recognize female perfidy.  With Johnny Tiernan alone he refused to enter the lists.  When the popular proprietor of the tin shop came sauntering along the sidewalk with nose uptilted, waving genial greetings to the various groups on the steps, Chris Auermann’s expression would suddenly change to one of fatuous playfulness.

“What’s this I hear about giving the girls the vote, Chris?” Johnny would innocently inquire, winking at Janet, invariably running his hand through the wiry red hair that resumed its corkscrew twist as soon as he released it.  And Chris would as invariably reply:—­“You have the dandruffs—­yes?  You come to my shop, I give you somethings....”

Sometimes the barber, in search of a more aggressive adversary than Edward, would pay visits, when as likely as not another neighbour with profound convictions and a craving for proselytes would swoop down on the defenceless Bumpuses:  Joe Shivers, for instance, who lived in one of the tenements above the cleaning and dyeing establishment kept by the Pappas Bros., and known as “The Gentleman.”  In the daytime Mr. Shivers was a model of acquiescence in a system he would have designated as one of industrial feudalism, his duty being to examine the rolls of cloth as they came from the looms of the Arundel Mill, in