She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all round at the litter of the fray: 

“And you sit like this here writing your—­your . . .”

“I—­what?  Oh, yes, I sit here all day.”

“It must be perfectly delightful.”

I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on the verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the porch, and my boy’s dog, patrolling the field in front, had espied him from afar.  He came on straight and swift like a cannon-ball, and the noise of the fight, which burst suddenly upon our ears, was more than enough to scare away a fit of apoplexy.  We went out hastily and separated the gallant animals.  Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife—­just round the corner, under the trees.  She nodded and went off with her dog, leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she had lightly made—­and with the awfully instructive sound of the word “delightful” lingering in my ears.

Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate.  I wanted to be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere novel that one should be rude to a lady on their account?), but mainly, to adopt the good sound Ollendorffian style, because I did not want the dog of the general’s daughter to fight again (encore) with the faithful dog of my infant son (mon petit garcon).—­Was I afraid that the dog of the general’s daughter would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my child?—­No, I was not afraid. . . .  But away with the Ollendorff method.  However appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin, character and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the child from a man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian value, a man almost childlike in the impulsive movements of his untutored genius, the most single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of straight feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong if, perhaps, not fully conscious conviction.  His art did not obtain, I fear, all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved.  I am alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of “The Red Badge of Courage,” a work of imagination which found its short moment of celebrity in the last decade of the departed century.  Other books followed.  Not many.  He had not the time.  It was an individual and complete talent, which obtained but a grudging, somewhat supercilious recognition from the world at large.  For himself one hesitates to regret his early death.  Like one of the men in his “Open Boat,” one felt that he was of those whom fate seldom allows to make a safe landing after much toil and bitterness at the oar.  I confess to an abiding affection for that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient figure.  He liked me even before we met on the strength of a page or two of my writing,