“I have a queer feeling I am. I don’t like it very much. He’s not at all the sort of man I expected to marry, and it will be horrid to be poor—although I bluffed it out to mother just now. But—well—those things happen.” “Don’t they! But I don’t quite get it. You don’t seem to fit the picture somehow. Sure you’re not deluding yourself? Novelty does wonders.” “Don’t think I am. Got a queer feeling I never had before. Thrills and all that. Turn hot and cold. Lose my breath. Stay awake nights thinking about it. Dr. Pelham—at a time when I was still calling him that—told me that love in our sex was an over-secretion of hormones in interstitial cells adjacent to the Graafian follicles; stimulation induced by powerful photographic image of someone of the opposite sex on the mental lens, which responds to certain old memories in the subconscious. Makes me fearfully set up to be anything as scientific as that, but I fancy I’d feel about the same anyway. Only hope the sub won’t find it’s mistaken and go into retreat when I’m living in Harlem and marketing on Sixth Avenue of a morning.” “And you really don’t think it will?” “No, I don’t!” Polly suddenly became serious. “Oh, yes, I really don’t. It would be wonderful to make a man like that happy. Grow with him. Really amount to something. I shouldn’t mind being poor for a few years.” Gita was appalled (albeit conscious of conflicting emotions underneath). She knew how little likely was Polly to realize her potentialities if she depended upon Geoffrey Pelham. For the moment she hated herself and him. What blind idiots men were. To give herself time to think she went into her “ark” to get a cigarette. She cared little for smoking but a cigarette had its uses. . . . If she really had any influence over him couldn’t she manage to steer him to Polly? He knew that his love for herself was hopeless and any man who made the mistake of falling in love with the wrong woman must come to his senses in time. Men were always falling in love with the wrong woman, getting over it, married, became fatuous fathers, and increased complacently in girth. Love was nothing but a superstition anyway. . . . Geoffrey was no fool to moon over one woman all his life. Besides, there was always the rebound if a sufficiently charming woman who wanted him was on the alert. . . . She wished she’d had more experience. Pretty delicate. She’d have to watch her chance; and also watch out. She returned to the day-bed, and exclaimed with enthusiasm: “It would be perfectly splendid, Polly. You’d bring each other out. I’ve always believed that all you needed was to fall in love with a really fine man and I was always afraid you wouldn’t.” Her eyes glowed with affection and Polly responded with a quick smile, wholly reassured. She’d been a brute to doubt Gita, and as a matter of fact she hadn’t. Her mother had stirred her up, thrown a wrench into her well-oiled mental machinery. That was all. Dear Gita.