t needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a
prostitute. If you haven't got the qualities which attract loose
men, what are you to do? Supposing it isn't in your nature to
attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then you can't be a
prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since
_willing_ won't do it. It requires a second party to come to an
agreement.

Therefore all Alvina's desperate and profligate schemes and ideas
fell to nought before the inexorable in her nature. And the
inexorable in her nature was highly exclusive and selective, an
inevitable negation of looseness or prostitution. Hence men were
afraid of her--of her power, once they had committed themselves. She
would involve and lead a man on, she would destroy him rather than
not get of him what she wanted. And what she wanted was something
serious and risky. Not mere marriage--oh dear no! But a profound and
dangerous inter-relationship. As well ask the paddlers in the small
surf of passion to plunge themselves into the heaving gulf of
mid-ocean. Bah, with their trousers turned up to their knees it was
enough for them to wet their toes in the dangerous sea. They were
having nothing to do with such desperate nereids as Alvina.

She had cast her mind on Arthur. Truly ridiculous. But there was
something compact and energetic and wilful about him that she
magnified ten-fold and so obtained, imaginatively, an attractive
lover. She brooded her days shabbily away in Manchester House, busy
with housework drudgery. Since the collapse of Throttle-Ha'penny,
James Houghton had become so stingy that it was like an inflammation
in him. A silver sixpence had a pale and celestial radiance which he
could not forego, a nebulous whiteness which made him feel he had
heaven in his hold. How then could he let it go. Even a brown penny
seemed alive and pulsing with mysterious blood, potent, magical. He
loved the flock of his busy pennies, in the shop, as if they had
been divine bees bringing him sustenance from the infinite. But the
pennies he saw dribbling away in household expenses troubled him
acutely, as if they were live things leaving his fold. It was a
constant struggle to get from him enough money for necessities.

And so the household diet became meagre in the extreme, the coal was
eked out inch by inch, and when Alvina must have her boots mended
she must draw on her own little stock of money. For James Houghton
had the impudence to m