gan 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.
Nobody'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
reassured. 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, passionately, 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