contact with the realities of the world; and he protested he could see no reason why a human being should be "cloistered and contracted" because of her sex. "What would not hurt my son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter. It will make a man of her without making her the less a woman." So he took her with him to the Café Bleu, and talked in her presence quite as freely as he might have talked had she been absent. As, in the greater number of his theological, political, and social convictions, he was exceedingly unorthodox, she heard a good deal, no doubt, that most of us would scarcely consider edifying for our daughters ears; but he had his system, he knew what he was about. "The question whether you can touch pitch and remain undefiled," he said, "depends altogether upon the spirit in which you approach it. The realities of the world, the realities of life, the real things of God's universe—what have we eyes for, if not to envisage them? Do so fearlessly, honestly, with a clean heart, and, man or woman, you can only be the better for it." Perhaps his system was a shade too simple, a shade too obvious, for this complicated planet; but he held to it in all sincerity. It was in pursuance of the same system, I daresay, that he taught Nina to fence, and to read Latin and Greek, as well as to play the piano, and turn an omelette. She could ply a foil against the best of us.
And then, quite suddenly, he died.
I think it was in March, or April; anyhow, it was a premature spring-like day, and he had left off his overcoat. That evening he went to the Odeon, and when, after the play, he joined us for supper at the Bleu, he said he thought he had caught a cold, and ordered hot grog. The next day he did not turn up at all; so several of us, after dinner, presented ourselves at his lodgings in Montparnasse. We found him in bed, with Nina reading to him.
