so sane, himself, that he couldn't understand, even after
he had been engaged six months, our little everyday madnesses. It never
occurred to him, when he got back to the girl and she began all sorts of
hysterical questions, not to answer them straight. It was by way of
describing the event simply, that he informed her that he would just
have had time to pull the creature out, but not enough to pull himself
back afterwards. Ferguson was used to calculating things in millionths
of an inch; she wasn't. I dare say the single second that had given
Ferguson time to turn round in his mind, she conceived of as a minute,
at least. It would have taken her a week to turn round in her own mind,
no doubt--a month, a year, perhaps. How do I know? But she got the
essential fact: that Ferguson had made a choice. Then she rounded on
him. It would have killed her to lose him, but she would rather have
lost him than to see him standing before her, etc., etc. Ferguson quoted
a lot of her talk straight to me, and I can remember it; but you needn't
ask me to soil my mouth with it. 'And half an hour before, she had been
saying with a good deal of heat that that little runt ought never to
have been born, and that if we had decent laws it never would have been
allowed to live." Ferguson said that to me, with a kind of bewilderment.
You see, he had made the mistake of taking that little fool seriously.
Well, he loved her. You can't go below that: that's rock-bottom.
Ferguson couldn't dig any deeper down for his way out. There _was_ no
deeper down.

"Apparently Ferguson still thought he could argue it out with her. She
so believed in eugenics, you see--a very radical, compared with
Ferguson. It was she who had had no doubt about tow-head. And the
love-part of it seemed to him fixed: it didn't occur to him that that
was debatable. So he stuck to something that could be discussed.
Then--and this was his moment of exceeding folly--he caught at the old
episode of the _Argentina_. _That_ had nothing to do with her present
state of shock. She had seen tow-head; but she hadn't seen the sprinkled
Mediterranean. And she had accepted that. At least, she had spoken of
his survival as though it had been one of the few times when God had
done precisely the right thing. So he took that to explain with. The
fool! The reasonable fool!

"Then--oh, then she went wild. (Yet she must have known there were a
thousand chances on the _Argentina_ for him to throw his