CHAPTER X.SERVANTS AND CHILDREN.
READER! are you married?
Have you offspring, boys especially I mean, say between six and twelve years of age?
Have you also a literary workshop, supplied with choice tools, some for use, some for ornament, where you pass pleasant hours?
and is--ah! there's the rub!--is there a special hand-maid, whose special duty it is to keep your den daily dusted and in order?
Plead you guilty to these indictments?
then am I sure of a sympathetic co-sufferer.
Dust! it is all a delusion.

It is not the dust that makes women anxious to invade the inmost recesses of your Sanctum--it is an ingrained curiosity.

And this feminine weakness, which dates from Eve, is a common motive in the stories of our oldest literature and Folk-lore.

What made Fatima so anxious to know the contents of the room forbidden her by Bluebeard?
It was positively nothing to her, and its contents caused not the slightest annoyance to anybody.

That story has a bad moral, and it would, in many ways, have been more satisfactory had the heroine been left to take her place in the blood-stained chamber, side by side with her peccant predecessors.