She had been through twenty of them already and was now on her twenty-first. He didn't deny that it was creditable to go in for culture. If that was the sort of thing she liked, why, as the fellow says, he supposed she liked that sort of thing. It's a free country. But as for him, when he was tired with the day's work, he thought he was entitled to a little recreation--a game of pool, a couple of glasses of beer, maybe a swim in a "nat"--he wasn't bad at the middle distances--and he couldn't see drawing up a chair under a lamp and going to work again, for that was what it amounted to, on a little green Epitome that you had to study over to get the meaning, or maybe look in the dictionary, as she was doing now. She had told him that they were more interesting than the other kind of books and had even got him to start on a couple she said he was sure to like, because they were so exciting--Marco Polo's Travels and Froissart's Chronicles--but they didn't excite him any, and he made only about thirty pages in each of them. Indeed, it was his private opinion that Georgia was more or less bunking herself with this upward and onward stuff. She fell for it because it helped her feel superior. And then she worked herself up to believing she really liked it because people were surprised she knew so much and said she had a naturally fine mind. A vicious circle. In all of which cogitations he was perhaps not entirely astray; though her chief incitement was more concrete than he supposed. She wanted to impress Stevens in particular, rather than people in general--she was determined to keep even with him so that he could never talk down to her as to a mere "womanly woman" who held him by sex and nothing more. When at last Mrs. Talbot arose, Al hastened to her, kissed her affectionately, slipped his arm around her, impelled her towards the door, opened it rapidly, kissed her again, closed it firmly behind her, lit a cigarette, and began: "Georgia, I want to have a heart to heart with you." "In a second." She read the last half page of her chapter so rapidly that she was compelled to read it over again for conscience' sake, then inserted her book-mark and turned to him: "Fire away." "Who's the mysterious stranger!" She had known it was coming for the last half hour. From the corner of her eye, she had spied the importance of the occasion actually oozing out of young Al. At first she thought of side-stepping the interview, but eventually decided not to, partly to please the lad and more still to hear how her case would stand when discussed aloud. She had been in a most chaotic state of mind ever since the agreement with Stevens to pretend; that which wasn't clear then was hazier now; she was of ten minds a day whether to give in to her lover or to give in to the Church. Now she would listen to Georgia and Al talk about the case as if they were two other people, in the hope of finding guidance in her eavesdropping.