_80._ Shortly after, Miss Francis ended her long sojourn at Mount Whitney and returned to England. The ordeal of living surrounded by the Grass, which had destroyed her assistants, seemed to have made no other change in her than the fading of her hair, which was now completely white, and a loss of weight, giving her a deceptive appearance of fragility at variance with the forthrightness of her manner. I put down her immunity to agoraphobia as just another evidence that she was already mad. Her refusal to accept the limitations of her sex and her complete indifference to our respective stations were mere confirmations. With her usual disregard of realities she assumed I would go on financing her indefinitely in spite of the hundreds of thousands of pounds I had paid out without visible result. "Ive really got it now, Weener," she assured me in a tone hardly befitting a suppliant for funds. "In spite of the incompetents you kept sending, in spite of mistakes and blind alleys, the work on Whitney is done--and successfully. The rest is routine laboratory work--a matter of quantities and methods of application." "I don't know that I can spare you any more money, Miss Francis." She laughed. "What the devil's the matter with you, Weener? Are your millions melting away? Or do you think any of the spies you set on me capable of carrying on--or are you just trying to crack the whip?" "I set no spies and I have no whip. I merely feel it may not be profitable to waste any more money on fruitless experiments." She snorted. "Time has streamlined and inflated your platitudes. When I am too old to work and ready for euthanasia I shall have you come and talk me to death. To hear you one would almost think you had no interest in finding a method to counter the Grass." Her egomania and impertinence were really insufferable; her notion of her own importance was ludicrous. "Interested or not, I have no reason to believe you alone are capable of scientific discovery. Anyway, the world seems pretty well off as it is." She tugged at her hair as if it were false and would come off if she jerked hard enough. "Of course it's well enough off from your pointofview. It offers you more food than you could eat if you had a million bellies, more clothes than you could wear out in a million years, more houses than you could live in if the million contradictions which go to make up any single human were suddenly made corporeal. Of course youre satisfied; why shouldnt you be? If the Grass were to be pushed back and the world once more enlarged, if hope and dissatisfaction were again to replace despair and content, you might not find yourself such a big toad in a small puddle--and you wouldnt like that, would you?" I had intended all along to give her a small pension to keep her from want and allow her to putter around, but her irrational accusations and insults only showed her to be the kind from whom no gratitude could be expected.