"Yes, of course," Louis replied politely.

She did not like that "of course."

"Shall I have to be?"

"I don't know."

"Well," said she, "I can tell you one thing--I shan't be."

IV

Rachel went on--

"You aren't really going to throw your money away on those debenture things of Mr. Batchgrew's, are you?"

Louis now knew the worst, and he had been suspecting it. Rachel's tone fully displayed her sentiments, and completed the disclosure that "the little thing" was angry and aggressive. (In his mind Louis regarded her at moments, as "the little thing.") But his own politeness was so profoundly rooted that practically no phenomenon of rudeness could overthrow it.

"No," he said, "I'm not going to 'throw my money away' on them."

"That's all right, then," she said, affecting not to perceive his drift. "I thought you were."

"But I propose to put my money into them, subject to anything you, as a financial expert, may have to say."

Nervously she had gone to the window and was pretending to straighten a blind.

"I don't think you need to make fun of me," she said. "You think I don't notice when you make fun of me. But I do--always."

"Look here, young 'un," Louis suddenly began to cajole, very winningly.

"I'm about as old as you are," said she, "and perhaps in some ways a bit older. And I must say I really wonder at you being ready to help Mr. Batchgrew after the way he insulted me in the cinema."

"Insulted you in the cinema!" Louis cried, genuinely startled, and then somewhat hurt because Rachel argued like a woman instead of like a man. In reflecting upon the excellences of Rachel he had often said to himself that her unique charm consisted in the fact that she combined the attractiveness of woman with the powerful commonsense of man. In common with a whole enthusiastic army of young husbands he had been convinced that his wife was the one female creature on earth to whom you could talk as you would to a male. "Oh!" he murmured.

"Have you forgotten it, then?" she asked coldly. To herself she was saying: "Why am I behaving like this? After all, he's done no harm yet." But she had set out, and she must continue, driven by the terrible fear of what he might do. She stared at the blind. Through a slit of window at one side of it she could see the lamp-post and the iron kerb of the pavement.

"But that's all over long ago," he protested amiably. "Just look how friendly you were with him yourself over supper! Besides--"

"Besides what? I wasn't friendly. I was only polite. I had to be.

n.o.body's called Mr. Batchgrew worse names than you have. But you forget. Only I don't forget. There's lots of things I don't forget, although I don't make a song about them. I shan't forget in a hurry how you let go of my bike without telling me and I fell all over the road. I know I'm lots more black and blue even than I was."

If Rachel would but have argued according to his rules of debate, Louis was confident that he could have conducted the affair to a proper issue. But she would not. What could he say? In a flash he saw a vista of, say, forty years of conjugal argument with a woman incapable of reason, and trembled. Then he looked again, and saw the lines of Rachel's figure in her delightful short skirt and was rea.s.sured. But still he did not know what to say. Rachel spared him further cogitation on that particular aspect of the question by turning round and exclaiming, pa.s.sionately, with a break in her voice--

"Can't you see that he'll swindle you out of the money?"

It seemed to her that the security of their whole future depended on her firmness and strong sagacity at that moment. She felt herself to be very wise and also, happily, very vigorous. But at the same time she was afflicted by a kind of despair at the thought that Louis had indeed been, and still was, ready to commit the disastrous folly of confiding money to Thomas Batchgrew for investment. And as Louis had had a flashing vision of the future, so did Rachel now have such a vision. But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal vigilance on her part and by nothing else--an instant's sleepiness, and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well.

She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic, but thus it was! She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings against Louis which she had been compelled to listen to in the previous year.

"Odd, of course!" said Louis. "But I can't exactly see how he'll swindle me out of the money! A debenture is a debenture."

"Is it?"

"Do you know what a debenture is, my child?"

"I don't need to know what a debenture is, when Mr. Batchgrew's mixed up in it."

Louis suppressed a sigh. He first thought of trying to explain to her just what a debenture was. Then he abandoned the enterprise as too complicated, and also as futile. Though he should prove to her that a debenture combined the safety of the Bank of England with the brilliance of a successful gambling transaction, she would not budge.

He was acquiring valuable and painful knowledge concerning women every second. He grew sad, not simply with the weight of this new knowledge, but more because, though he had envisaged certain difficulties of married existence, he had not envisaged this difficulty. He had not dreamed that a wife would demand a share, and demand it furiously, in the control of his business affairs. He had sincerely imagined that wives listened with much respect and little comprehension when business was on the carpet, content to murmur soothingly from time to time, "Just as you think best, dear." Life had unpleasantly astonished him.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say to Rachel, with steadying facetiousness--

"You mustn't forget that I know a bit about these things, having spent years of my young life in a bank."

But a vague instinct told him that to draw attention to his career in the bank might be unwise--at any rate, in principle.

"Can't you see," Rachel charged again, "that Mr. Batchgrew has only been flattering you all this time so as to get hold of your money? And wasn't it just like him to begin again harping on the electricity?>"

"Flattering me?"

"Well, he couldn't bear you before--if you'd only heard the things he used to say!--and now he simply licks your boots."

"What things did he say?" Louis asked, disturbed.

"Oh, never mind!"

Louis became rather glum and obstinate.

"The money will be perfectly safe," he insisted, "and our income pretty nearly doubled. I suppose I ought to know more about these things than you."

"What's the use of income being doubled if you lose the capital?"

Rachel snapped, now taking a horrid, perverse pleasure in the perilous altercation. "And if it's so safe why is he ready to give you so much interest?"

The worst of women, Louis reflected, is that in the midst of a silly argument that you can shatter in ten words they will by a fluke insert some awkward piece of genuine ratiocination, the answer to which must necessarily be lengthy and ineffective.

"It's no good arguing," he said pleasantly, and then repeated, "I ought to know more about these things than you."

Rachel raised her voice in exasperation--

"I don't see it, I don't see it at all. If it hadn't been for me you'd have thrown up your situation--and a nice state of affairs there would have been then! And how much money would you have wasted on holidays and so on and so on if I hadn't stopped you, I should like to know!"

Louis was still more astonished. Indeed, he was rather nettled. His urbanity was unimpaired, but he permitted himself a slight acidity of tone as he retorted with gentle malice--

"Well, you can't help the colour of your hair. So I'll keep my nerve."

"I didn't expect to be insulted!" cried Rachel, flushing far redder than that rich hair of hers, and paced pompously out of the room, her face working violently. The door was ajar. She pa.s.sed Mrs. Tams on the stairs, blindly, with lowered head.