“Indeed, sir!”

“Indeed,” said I.

“And why, pray?”

“Because,” said I, knocking the ashes from my pipe, “because the more I think about her the more incomprehensible she becomes.”

“Have you known many women?”

“Very few,” I confessed, “but—­”

“But?”

“I am not altogether unfamiliar with the sex—­for I have known a great number—­in books.”

“Our blacksmith,” said Charmian, addressing the moon again, “has known many women—­in books!  His knowledge is, therefore, profound!” and she laughed.

“May I ask why you laugh at me?”

“Oh!” said she, “don’t you know that women in books and women out of books are no more the same than day and night, or summer and winter?”

“And yet there are thousands of women who exist for us in books only, Laura, Beatrice, Trojan Helen, Aspasia, the glorious Phryne, and hosts of others,” I demurred.

“Yes; but they exist for us only as their historians permit them, as their biographers saw, or imagined them.  Would Petrarch ever have permitted Laura to do an ungracious act, or anything which, to his masculine understanding, seemed unfeminine; and would Dante have mentioned it had Beatrice been guilty of one?  A man can no more understand a woman from the reading of books than he can learn Latin or Greek from staring at the sky.”

“Of that,” said I, shaking my head, “of that I am not so sure.”

“Then—­personally—­you know very little concerning women?” she inquired.

“I have always been too busy,” said I. Here Charmian turned to look at me again.

“Too busy?” she repeated, as though she had not heard aright; “too busy?”

“Much too busy!” Now, when I said this, she laughed, and then she frowned, and then she laughed again.

“You would much rather make a—­horseshoe than talk with a woman, perhaps?”

“Yes, I think I would.”

“Oh!” said Charmian, frowning again, but this time she did not look at me.

“You see,” I explained, turning my empty pipe over and over, rather aimlessly, “when I make a horseshoe I take a piece of iron and, having heated it, I bend and shape it, and with every hammer-stroke I see it growing into what I would have it—­I am sure of it, from start to finish; now, with a woman it is—­different.”

“You mean that you cannot bend, and shape her, like your horseshoe?” still without looking towards me.

“I mean that—­that I fear I should never be quite sure of a —­woman, as I am of my horseshoe.”

“Why, you see,” said Charmian, beginning to braid the tress of hair, “a woman cannot, at any time, be said to resemble a horseshoe—­very much, can she?”

“Surely,” said I, “surely you know what I mean—?”

“There are Laura and Beatrice and Helen and Aspasia and Phryne, and hosts of others,” said Charmian, nodding to the moon again.  “Oh, yes—­our blacksmith has read of so many women in books that he has no more idea of women out of books than I of Sanscrit.”