?'

'How you do go on,' remarked Maria placidly. 'What I meant to say is
that don't you think Jack's rather too attentive to Victoria?'

Mr Holt dropped his paper suddenly. 'Attentive?' he growled, 'haven't
noticed it.'

'Oh! you men never notice things,' replied Mrs Holt with conscious
superiority. 'Don't say I didn't warn you, that's all.'

'Now look here, Maria,' said Mr Holt, his blue eyes darkening visibly,
'I don't want any more of this tittle tattle. You can keep it for the
next P.S.A. I can tell you that if the young cub is "attentive" to Mrs
Fulton, well, so much the better: it'll teach him something worth
knowing if he finds out that there's somebody else in the world who's
worth doing something for beyond _his_ precious self.'

'Very well, very well,' purred Mrs Holt. 'If you take it like that, I
don't mind, Thomas. Don't say I didn't warn you if anything happens.
That's all.'

Mr Holt got up from the leather chair and left the room. There were
moments when his wife roused in him the fury that filled him when once,
in his young days, he had dropped steel bolts into the cement grinders
to gratify a grudge against an employer. The temper that had made him
rejoice over the sharp cracks speaking of smashed axles was in him
still. He had got above the social stratum where husbands beat their
wives, but innuendoes and semi-secrets goaded him almost to paroxysm.

Mrs Holt heard the door slam and coolly took up her work. She was
engaged in the congenial task of disfiguring a piece of Morris chintz.
She had decided that the little bag given her by an aesthetic friend was
too flat and she was busily employed in embroidering the 'eyebright'
pattern, with coloured wool in the most approved early Victorian manner.
'At any rate,' she thought, 'Thomas has got the idea in his head.'

Mrs Holt had not arrived at her determination to awaken her husband's
suspicions without much thought. She had begun to realise that
'something was wrong' one Sunday afternoon at the Zoo. She had taken
Jack and Victoria in the barouche, putting down to a fit of filial
affection the readiness of Jack to join them. She had availed herself of
the opportunity to drive round the Circle; so as to show off her adored
son to the Bramleys, who were there in their electric, to the Wilsons,
who were worth quite fifty thousand a year, to the Wellensteins too, who
seemed to do so wonderfully well on the Stock Exchange. Jack had taken
it very nicely