Lord Pinkerton said, 'You're making a big mistake, Babs. That fellow won't last. He's building on sand, as the Bible puts it--building on sand. I hear on good authority that the _Fact_ can't go on many months longer, unless it changes its tone and methods considerably; it's got no chance of fighting its way as it is now. People don't want that kind of thing. They don't want anything the Gideon lot will give them. Gideon and his sort haven't got the goods. They're building on the sand of their own fancy, not on the rock of general human demand. I hear that that daily they talked of starting can't come off yet, either.... The chap's a bad investment, Babs.... And he despises me and my goods, you know. That'll be awkward.' 'Not you, daddy. The papers, he does. He rather likes you, though he doesn't approve of you.... He doesn't like mother, and she doesn't like him. But people often don't get on with their mothers-in-law.' 'It's an awkward alliance, my dear, a very awkward alliance. What will people say? Besides, he's a Jew.' Jewish babies; he was thinking of them too. Jane thought, bother the babies. Perhaps there wouldn't be any, and if there were, they'd only be a quarter Jew. Anyhow, it wasn't them she wanted; it was Arthur. Arthur opened doors and windows. You got to the edge of your own thought, and then stepped out beyond into his thought. And his thought drove sharp and hard into space. But more than this, Jane loved the way his hair grew, and the black line his eyebrows made across his forehead, and the way he stood, tall and lean and slouching, and his keen thin face and his long thin hands, and the way his mouth twisted up when he smiled, and his voice, and the whole of him. She wondered if he loved her like that--if he turned hot and cold when he saw her in the distance. She believed that he did love her like that. He had loved her, as she had loved him, all that time he had thought she was lying to every one about Oliver's death. 'It isn't what people do,' said Jane, 'that makes one love them or stop loving them.' 'Is this,' she thought, 'what Clare felt for Oliver? I didn't know it was like this, or I wouldn't have taken him from her. Poor old Clare.' Could one love Oliver like that? Any one, Jane supposed, could be loved like that, by the right person. And people like Clare loved more intensely than people like her; they felt more, and had fewer other occupations. Jane hadn't known that she could feel so much about anything as she was feeling now about Gideon. It was interesting. She wondered how long it would last, at this pitch. CHAPTER III THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD 1 Jane's baby was born in January. As far as babies can be like grown human beings, it was like its grandfather--a little Potter. Lord Pinkerton was pleased.