that we met. He came on a visit. He
noticed me. I--well--we are married now."

She was thankful that his eyes were shut. It made it easier to talk of
the future she had arranged, which now was an unalterable thing. She did
not enter on the path of confidences. That was impossible. She felt he
would not understand her. She felt also that he suffered. Now and then
a great anxiety gripped her heart with a mysterious sense of guilt--as
though she had betrayed him into the hands of an enemy. With his eyes
shut he had an air of weary and pious meditation. She was a little
afraid of it. Next moment a great pity for him filled her heart. And in
the background there was remorse. His face twitched now and then just
perceptibly. He managed to keep his eyelids down till he heard that the
'husband' was a sailor and that he, the father, was being taken straight
on board ship ready to sail away from this abominable world of
treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over the blue
sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and spacious refuge
for wounded souls.

Something like that. Not the very words perhaps but such was the general
sense of her overwhelming argument--the argument of refuge.

I don't think she gave a thought to material conditions. But as part of
that argument set forth breathlessly, as if she were afraid that if she
stopped for a moment she could never go on again, she mentioned that
generosity of a stormy type, which had come to her from the sea, had
caught her up on the brink of unmentionable failure, had whirled her away
in its first ardent gust and could be trusted now, implicitly trusted, to
carry them both, side by side, into absolute safety.

She believed it, she affirmed it. He understood thoroughly at last, and
at once the interior of that cab, of an aspect so pacific in the eyes of
the people on the pavements, became the scene of a great agitation. The
generosity of Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet--affected the
ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have brought home to Flora
de Barral the extreme arduousness of the business of being a woman. Being
a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of
dealings with men. This man--the man inside the cab--cast oft his stiff
placidity and behaved like an animal. I don't mean it in an offensive
sense. What he did was to give way to an instinctive panic. Like some
wild creature scare