“You are developing nerves,” said Judith.  “Is it a guilty conscience?” She laughed.  “You are hiding something from me.  I’ve been aware of it all the time.”

“Indeed?  How?”

“By the sixth sense of woman!”

Confound the sixth sense of woman!  I suppose it has been developed like a cat’s whiskers to supply the deficiency of a natural scent.  Also, like the whiskers, it is obtrusive, and a matter for much irritatingly complacent pride.  Judith regarded me with a mock magisterial air, and I was put into the dock at once.

“Something has happened,” I said, desperately.  “A female woman has come and taken up her residence at 26 Lingfield Terrace.  A few weeks ago she ate with her fingers and believed the earth was flat.  I found her in the Victoria Embankment Gardens beneath the terrace of the National Liberal Club, and now she lives on chocolate creams and the ‘Child’s Guide to Knowledge.’  She is eighteen and her name is Carlotta.  There!”

As my cigarette had gone out, I threw it with some peevishness into the grate.  Judith’s expression had changed from mock to real gravity.  She sat bolt upright and looked at me somewhat stonily.

“What in the world do you mean, Marcus?”

“What I say.  I’m saddled with the responsibility of a child of nature as unsophisticated and perplexing as Voltaire’s Huron.  She’s English and she came from a harem in Syria, and she is as beautiful as the houris she believes in and is unfortunately precluded from joining.  One of these days I shall be teaching her her catechism.  I have already washed her face.  Kindly pity me as the innocent victim of fantastic circumstances.”

“I don’t see why I should pity you,” said Judith.

I felt I had not explained Carlotta tactfully.  If there are ten ways of doing a thing I have noticed that I invariably select the one way that is wrong.  I perceived that somehow or other the very contingency I had feared had come to pass.  I had prejudiced Judith against Carlotta.  I had aroused the Ishmaelite—­her hand against every woman and every woman’s hand against her—­that survives in all her sex.

“My dear Judith,” said I, “if a wicked fairy godmother had decreed that a healthy rhinoceros should be my housemate you would have extended me your sympathy.  But because Fate has inflicted on me an equally embarrassing guest in the shape of a young woman—­”

“My dear Marcus,” interrupted Judith, “the healthy rhinoceros would know twenty times as much about women as you do.”  This I consider one of the silliest remarks Judith has ever made. " Do,” she continued, “tell me something coherent about this young person you call Carlotta.”

I told the story from beginning to end.

“But why in the world did you keep it from me?” she asked.

“I mistrusted the sixth sense of woman,” said I.

“The most elementary sense of woman or any one else would have told you that you were doing a very foolish thing.”