There were times when the artist in Mrs. Venables sank a little in the helper; but here she ran up against a very blank inapprehensiveness. She had perforce to grasp that her uses in this capacity were purely financial. It is not easy to give to those who will not receive, who do not even apprehend their own need of gifts. This inapprehensiveness was as a blank wall; there was no surmounting it. They looked at each other from either side of a spiritual and social gulf; and the ignoring of its existence on the one side made any attempts at throwing, as it were, a rope across from the other impossible. The rope would have dangled--did dangle when experimentally thrown--ludicrously futile in mid-air. The thrower stepped back again to the artist's standpoint, and absorbed impressions. To give financial help came to assume an aspect of immorality. Loans were gratefully taken, and no talk of repayment even remotely rose. It was, as Warren had put it, 'very obvious'--so obvious as to be tiresome. Illumination was shed on the aspect which the payment of debts presented to the Crevequers on the night when they came to dinner, in their redeemed dress-clothes, after winning on the lottery. 'And it all went,' Tommy concluded his narrative, stammering querulously, 'to a silly fool we owed money to. Wasn't it a shame, Mrs. Venables? We owed it him for months; he needn't have been in such a tearing hurry all of a sudden. Waste, wasn't it? All kinds of things, you know, we might have done with it. If we'd hired a motor-car, would you all have come to Pompei with us? Or would you rather have taken a boat to Capri? You could have had your choice, anyhow. And all that money wasted; we might just as well have dropped it into the sea, you know--better; it would have been fun diving for it and bringing it up with our toes. Do you know how to do that, Venables? I did it once when a North German Lloyd was going out. You know how they swim round and dive for money and make such a horrid row? Well, I thought I'd do it, too, once, because it was such a nice warm day; and they threw me pennies, but another man always brought them up with his toes; I could never find them. Sell, wasn't it? but much funnier than paying all that money to Grollo. People are so grasping, aren't they.' It was manifest that money lent to the Crevequers must be accounted a bad debt. Mrs. Venables lent no more; her moral sense rebelled against it. But Warren proved himself admirably accommodating. CHAPTER V BAIÆ'S BAY 'I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day.' R. L. STEVENSON. 'Why should I care for the ages, Because they are old and grey? To me, like sudden laughter, The stars are fresh and gay. The world is a daring fancy, And finished yesterday.' G. K. CHESTERTON.