"It's all she wants," Krafft had replied, when his companion ventured
to take her part. "She wouldn't thank you to be treated differently.
Believe me, women are all alike; they are made to be trodden on.
Ill-usage brings out their good points--just as kneading makes dough
light. Let them alone, or pamper them, and they spread like a weed,
and choke you"--and he quoted a saying about going to women and not
forgetting the whip, at which Maurice stood aghast.

"But why, if you despise a person like that--why have her always about
you?" he cried, at the end of a flaming plea for woman's dignity and
worth.

Krafft shrugged his shoulders. "I suppose the truth is we are
dependent on them--yes, dependent, from the moment we are laid in the
cradle. It's a woman who puts on our first clothes and a woman who
puts on our last. But why talk about these things?"--he slipped his
arm through Maurice's. "Tell me about yourself; and when you are tired
of talking, I will play."

It usually ended in his playing. They ranged through the highways and
byways of music.

One afternoon--it was a warm, wet, grey day towards the end of
August--Maurice found Krafft in a strangely apathetic mood. The
weather, this moist warmth, had got on his nerves, he said; he had
been unable to settle to anything; was weighed down by a lassitude
heavier than iron. When Maurice entered, he was stretched on the sofa,
with closed eyes; on his chest slept Wotan, the one-eyed cat,
now growing sleek and fat. While Maurice was trying to rally him,