Though they talked on these walks they were still curiously evasive. Indeed, they were afraid of each other. They kept falling away from their private thoughts and intentions. They generalized, they discussed Marriage and George Gissing and Bernard Shaw and the suffrage movement and the agitation for the reform of the divorce laws. They pursued imaginary cases into distant thickets of contingency remotely far from the personal issues between them.... § 6 One day came an incident that Marjorie found wonderfully illuminating. Trafford had a fit of rage. Stung by an unexpected irritation, he forgot himself, as people say, and swore, and was almost physically violent, and the curious thing was that so he lit up things for her as no premeditated attempt of his had ever done. A copy of the _Scientific Bulletin_ fired the explosion. He sat down at the breakfast-table with the heaviness of a rather overworked and worried man, tasted his coffee, tore open a letter and crumpled it with his hand, turned to the _Bulletin_, regarded its list of contents with a start, opened it, read for a minute, and expressed himself with an extraordinary heat of manner in these amazing and unprecedented words: "Oh! Damnation and damnation!" Then he shied the paper into the corner of the room and pushed his plate from him. "Damn the whole scheme of things!" he said, and met the blank amazement of Marjorie's eye. "Behrens!" he said with an air of explanation. "Behrens?" she echoed with a note of inquiry. "He's doing my stuff!" He sat darkling for a time and then hit the table with his fist so hard that the breakfast things seemed to jump together--to Marjorie's infinite amazement. "I can't _stand_ it!" he said. She waited some moments. "I don't understand," she began. "What has he done?" "Oh!" was Trafford's answer. He got up, recovered the crumpled paper and stood reading. "Fool and thief," he said. Marjorie was amazed beyond measure. She felt as though she had been effaced from Trafford's life. "Ugh!" he cried and slapped back the _Bulletin_ into the corner with quite needless violence. He became aware of Marjorie again. "He's doing my work," he said. And then as if he completed the explanation: "And I've got to be in Croydon by half-past ten to lecture to a pack of spinsters and duffers, because they're too stupid to get the stuff from books. It's all in books,--every bit of it."