OUR HELP 167 



malaise, perhaps, or cares and anxieties, you 

 may be driven to suggest that conversation 

 (Heaven save the mark !) might flow in a 

 more cheerful channel than that of her 

 ailments : she bursts into tears, and howls 

 stormily that ' No one loves ' her. You 

 wonder whether anyone does, and ' if so, 

 how many ?' You soothe her fancied ills 

 and wrongs ; you, in fact, are in charge of 

 a great overgrown baby. You take her 

 driving, and the glories of sky and mountain 

 are for you obscured by her enormous pre- 

 ponderance of matter. Dissolving brain and 

 weary ears are tormented by ceaseless itera- 

 tion of what ' Charlie he sez to me,' or ' me to 

 Charlie,' or 'what me and Bill ate for our 

 supper'; or with narrations of social gatherings 

 and triumphs in which you could never have 

 shared. Truly, you never could. It is in 

 hours such as these that you realize you are 

 in the desert indeed ; and though she is 

 funny, very funny, she palls. And then 

 there come dark days of your own, when to 

 live perpetually in the atmosphere of a vulgar 

 egotist, whose coarseness, moreover, keeps 

 you in a chronic state of wince, is an existence 



