SORE SPOTS 
479 
years ago. Place: Paris, just off the Place des Tertres, 
overlooking the city. A large and lovely studio, panelled in 
oak. Strange: it was completely bare, and so far as one could 
see, it had no door. The skylights, mindful, were carefully 
screened with broidered stuff. A gallery, some ten feet from 
the floor, ran round one corner. Here was a buffet, loaded 
with priceless wines and liquors of all sorts-except 
the 
"soft"-and 
excellent 
variety 
of all cold "snack" 
refreshments. One gained it by a staircase from the lower 
floor. 
By the buffet , the old butler: oh, for a painter to portray 
his Weariness of Evil Wisdom! 
Our host led us to the gallery; "we ate and drank and saw" 
not God also, but the lady responsible for the heavy tread 
upon the stairs. A woman of the HaIles Centrales, in her early 
forties; coarse, brutal, ugly, robust, square-set, curiously 
radiant with some magnetic form of energy. 
I cannot describe her clothes-for 
lack of material. She 
greeted us all round with a sort of surly good humour . The 
butler took a pot of very far-gone Roquefort cheese, and 
smeared her all over. She drank to us, and clumped away 
downstairs. She came out into the studio from under the 
gallery, braced herself and shook her mop of hair as if about 
to wrestle, waved to us and waited. 
A minute later a small trap at the far end of the studio was 
smartly pulled up; in rushed a hundred starving rats. There 
was a moment's hesitation; but the smell of the cheese was 
too much, and they rushed her. She caught one in both 
hands, bit through its spine, and flung it aside. 
Softly repeating to myself passages from The Revenge by 
the late Alfred Lord Tennyson, of which the scene most 
powerfully reminded me, "Rat after rat, for half an hour, 
flung back as fast as it came." Their courage wilted; the 
hunted became the huntress ; I thought of Artemis as I sang 
softly to myself, "When the hounds of spring are on winter's 
traces." Bllt she pursued ; snapped the last spine, and flung it 
into the gallery with a yell of triumph .