Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/89

 men, and in this he was a great relief to the man or woman who cannot be content to be met halfway by the trouble of others, so to speak, but charge, and dodge, and try every way which a rapid tongue can do to break through, outflank and take in the rear the others' defences—and for what good? But anyway, he was a dangerous man with any woman (perhaps unconsciously or half consciously dangerous), the more so because he was incapable, no matter how hard he tried, of constancy. But he may once, and for years, have been domesticated, affectionate, a kind husband and father, and a gentleman in every sense of the word. He may once have believed in himself. Mrs. Coxgrave, the woman with the red hair rheumatic husband, and no child, was on several occasions interrupted, and once by the maternal snake, too, talking earnestly to him in the bar when her husband was laid up above stairs. And it made no talk—"They was only talkin' about rheumatism." I wonder now if——

The evil neck and faces craned over the little quick-set hedges, looking both ways in vain, till one bright afternoon Bob, who avoided the house during Billy's absence, came out of the Farmers' Arms from a silent half-pint, just as Lizzie was passing on her way to Shepperton for a piece of silk for a belt that a new blouse was "waitin' on," and Bob being going there too, as Defoe would put it, for a pair of working boots, and being already turned in that direction, and the eyes of both hags being on them, there was nothing for it but to walk to Shepperton