Then comes The Woman of the snoopopathic story.  She is always “beautifully groomed” (who these grooms are that do it, and where they can be hired, I don’t know), and she is said to be “exquisitely gowned.”

It is peculiar about The Woman that she never seems to wear a dress—­always a “gown.”  Why this is, I cannot tell.  In the good old stories that I used to read, when I could still read for the pleasure of it, the heroines —­that was what they used to be called—­always wore dresses.  But now there is no heroine, only a woman in a gown.  I wear a gown myself—­at night.  It is made of flannel and reaches to my feet, and when I take my candle and go out to the balcony where I sleep, the effect of it on the whole is not bad.  But as to its “revealing every line of my figure”—­as The Woman’s gown is always said to—­and as to its “suggesting even more than it reveals”—­well, it simply does not.  So when I talk of “gowns” I speak of something that I know all about.

Yet, whatever The Woman does, her “gown” is said to “cling” to her.  Whether in the street or in a cabaret or in the drawing-room, it “clings.”  If by any happy chance she throws a lace wrap about her, then it clings; and if she lifts her gown—­as she is apt to—­it shows, not what I should have expected, but a jupon, and even that clings.  What a jupon is I don’t know.  With my gown, I never wear one.  These people I have described, The Man and The Woman—­The Snoopopaths—­are, of course, not husband and wife, or brother and sister, or anything so simple and old-fashioned as that.  She is some one else’s wife.  She is The Wife of the Other Man.  Just what there is, for the reader, about other men’s wives, I don’t understand.  I know tons of them that I wouldn’t walk round a block for.  But the reading public goes wild over them.  The old-fashioned heroine was unmarried.  That spoiled the whole story.  You could see the end from the beginning.  But with Another Man’s Wife, the way is blocked.  Something has got to happen that would seem almost obvious to anyone.

The writer, therefore, at once puts the two snoopos—­The Man and The Woman—­into a frightfully indelicate position.  The more indelicate it is, the better.  Sometimes she gets into his motor by accident after the theatre, or they both engage the drawing-room of a Pullman car by mistake, or else, best of all, he is brought accidentally into her room at an hotel at night.  There is something about an hotel room at night, apparently, which throws the modern reader into convulsions.  It is always easy to arrange a scene of this sort.  For example, taking the sample beginning that I gave above, The Man, whom I left sitting at the cabaret table, above, rises unsteadily —­it is the recognised way of rising in a cabaret—­and, settling the reckoning with the waiter, staggers into the street.  For myself I never do a reckoning with the waiter.  I just pay the bill as he adds it, and take a chance on it.