said Mr. Hoopdriver.

"But to walk straight into the face of danger!"

"It's habit," said Mr. Hoopdriver, quite modestly, flicking off a
particle of cigarette ash that had settled on his knee.

XXXIII. THE ABASEMENT OF MR. HOOPDRIVER

On Monday morning the two fugitives found themselves breakfasting at the
Golden Pheasant in Blandford. They were in the course of an elaborate
doubling movement through Dorsetshire towards Ringwood, where Jessie
anticipated an answer from her schoolmistress friend. By this time they
had been nearly sixty hours together, and you will understand that Mr.
Hoopdriver's feelings had undergone a considerable intensification and
development. At first Jessie had been only an impressionist sketch
upon his mind, something feminine, active, and dazzling, something
emphatically "above" him, cast into his company by a kindly fate.
His chief idea, at the outset, as you know, had been to live up to
her level, by pretending to be more exceptional, more wealthy, better
educated, and, above all, better born than he was. His knowledge of the
feminine mind was almost entirely derived from the young ladies he had
met in business, and in that class (as in military society and among
gentlemen's servants) the good old tradition of a brutal social
exclusiveness is still religiously preserved. He had an almost
intolerable dread of her thinking him a I bounder.' Later he began
to perceive the distinction of her idiosyncracies. Coupled with a
magnificent want of experience was a splendid enthusiasm for abstract
views of the most advanced description, and her strength of conviction
completely carried Hoopdriver away. She was going to Live her Own Life,
with emphasis, and Mr. Hoopdriver was profoundly stirred to similar
resolves. So soon as he grasped the tenor of her views, he perceived
that he himself had thought as much from his earliest years. "Of
course," he remarked, in a flash of sexual pride, "a man is freer than a
woman. End in the Colonies, y'know, there isn't half the Conventionality
you find in society in this country."

He made one or two essays in the display of unconventionality, and
was quite unaware that he impressed her as a narrow-minded person. He
suppressed the habits of years and made no proposal to go to church.
He discussed church-going in a liberal spirit. "It's jest a habit," he
said, "jest a custom. I don't see what good it does you at all, really."
And he made a lot of excellent j