Today's Stichomancy for Naomi Campbell

rifle barrels. The flaps of the cartridge boxes were all unfastened, and bobbed idiotically with each movement. The rifles, once loaded, were jerked to the shoulder and fired without apparent aim into the smoke or at one of the blurred and shift- ing forms which upon the field before the regi- ment had been growing larger and larger like puppets under a magician's hand.

The officers, at their intervals, rearward, neg- lected to stand in picturesque attitudes. They were bobbing to and fro roaring directions and

The Red Badge of Courage

not drunk that day, ran to harness the horse. Nikita, though an habitual drunkard, was not drunk that day because since the last day before the fast, when he had drunk his coat and leather boots, he had sworn off drink and had kept his vow for two months, and was still keeping it despite the temptation of the vodka that had been drunk everywhere during the first two days of the feast.

Nikita was a peasant of about fifty from a neighbouring village, 'not a manager' as the peasants said of him, meaning that he was not the thrifty head of a household but lived most of his time away from home as a labourer. He was valued

Master and Man

satisfy him but a woman with a title. Claudine, it was true, had made progress; she had learned to dress as well as the best-dressed woman of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; she had freed her bearing of the unhallowed traces; she walked with a chastened, inimitable grace; but this was not enough. This praise of her enabled Claudine to swallow down the rest.

"But one day La Palferine said, 'If you wish to be the mistress of one La Palferine, poor, penniless, and without prospects as he is, you ought at least to represent him worthily. You should have a carriage and liveried servants and a title. Give me all the gratifications of vanity that will never be mine in my own person. The woman whom I

right--it IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn't read it!"

Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another generation the book will be a classic."

"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic. It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen DID know her--"

"Did he?" came from Flamel.

"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has