The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride, preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled a certain enforced contact.  When the heat in the little dining-room grew unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared in common with the household of the barber.  It is true that the barber’s wife was a mild hausfrau who had little to say, and that their lodgers, two young Germans who worked in the mills, spent most of their evenings at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling a strong odour of bay rum, would arrive promptly at quarter past eight, take off his coat, and thus, as it were stripped for action, would turn upon the defenceless Edward.

“Vill you mention one great man—­yoost one—­who is not greater if the vimmen leave him alone?” he would demand.  “Is it Anthony, the conqueror of Egypt and the East?  I vill show you Cleopatra.  Und Burns, and Napoleon, the greatest man what ever lived—­vimmen again.  I tell you there is no Elba, no St. Helena if it is not for the vimmen.  Und vat vill you say of Goethe?”

Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.

“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.