The unimaginative creature could suggest nothing.  She thought that I would know how to deal with the offence.  Perhaps preventive measures would be more efficacious than punishment.  But what do I know of the repressory methods employed in seminaries for young ladies?  Burton in his “Anatomy” speaks cheerfully of blood-letting behind the ears.  He also quotes, I remember, Hippocrates or somebody, who narrates that a noble maiden was cured of a flirtatious temperament by wearing down her back for three weeks a leaden plate pierced with holes.  This I told Miss Griggs, who spoke contemptuously of the Father of Medicine.

“He also recommends—­whether for this complaint, or for something similar I forget for the moment—­” said I, “anointing the soles of the feet with the fat of a dormouse, the teeth with the ear-wax of a dog; and speaks highly of a ram’s lungs applied hot to the fore part of the head.  I am sorry these admirable remedies are out of date.  There is a rich Rabelaisianism about them.  Instead of the satisfying jorums of our forefathers we take tasteless pellets, which procure us no sensation at the time, and even the good old hot mustard poultice is a thing of the past.”

“But what about Carlotta?” inquired Miss Griggs, anxiously.

That is just like a woman, to interrupt a man when he is beginning to talk comfortably on a subject that interests him.  I sighed.

“Send Carlotta up to me,” I said, resignedly.

Another morning’s work spoiled.  I turned to my writing-table.  I had just transcribed on my MS. the anecdote told with such glee by Machiavelli about Zanobi del Pino, a sort of Admiral Byng of the early fifteenth century, who was locked up and given nothing to eat but paper painted with snakes, so that he died, fasting, in a few days.  I had an apt epigram on the subject of Renaissance humour trembling on my pen-point, when Miss Griggs came in with her foolish gossip.  I am sure the platitude I wrote afterwards is not that original flash of wit.

Carlotta entered and crossed the room to the side of my writing-chair, her great dark eyes fixed on me, and her hands dutifully behind her back.  She looked a Greuze picture of innocence.  I believed less than ever in the enormity of the offence.

“Do you know what you’re here for?” I asked, magisterially.

She nodded.

“Then you have been making love to the young man from the grocer’s?”

She nodded again.  I began to conceive a violent dislike to the grocer’s young man.  It was one of the most humiliating sensations I have experienced.  I think I have seen the individual—­a thick-set, red-headed, freckled nondescript.

“What did you do it for?” I asked.

“He wanted to make love to me,” replied Carlotta.

“He is a young scamp,” said I.

“What is a scamp?” she asked sweetly.

“I am not giving you a lesson in philology,” I remarked.  “Do you know that you have been behaving in a shocking manner?”