“In your mind you have,” she said calmly. “It is very rude to contradict a lady! Now, Mr. Dawlish, I challenge you! If you think you are permanently down and out, the incident is finished, and I think you’re finished, too.” She looked at him through her half-closed eyes, nodding slowly. “You mean I’m not worth salving?” he asked, and got up. “I’ll accept your challenge.” He took the pencil, scribbled a few words on the writing pad, and, tearing it off, handed it to the girl. “Produce your twenty pounds.” He was amused in a sour way, but his anger was mostly directed inward to himself, that he should be angry at all. If anybody had told him, when he had walked into that room, that he would accept a loan of money from the girl who had not been absent from his thoughts since he had met her, he would have laughed at such a suggestion. Yet here he was, counting solemnly the notes as they were handed to him, and pocketing them without one single qualm of conscience. “I think I’m beginning to know myself,” he said. “I started a weakling, and prison hasn’t improved me. No, no, I do not mean that it is a weakness to accept this money, but it would have been a weakness to refuse. I’m awfully obliged to you.” She held out her hand. “Where will you be staying?” she asked. “I don’t know. But I will keep in touch with you. Please don’t bother about me any more. If I can’t get a job of some kind, I’m really not worth helping. Why are you doing this? It isn’t part of the usual police procedure.” She shook her head. “The police help where they can, you ought to know that,” she said quietly. “But I admit that this is a purely personal action on my part. You are part of a big experiment. It isn’t my womanly heart, but my scientific brain that is dictating just now.” And then, going off at a tangent: “I wish you would shave yourself, Mr. Dawlish. You look too much like a musical genius to be thoroughly wholesome.” He was still chuckling to himself when Lucretia closed the outer door upon him with unnecessary violence. He knew a small temperance hotel where he could sleep that night, a place in Lambeth, near Waterloo Station. “Temperance hotel” was rather a grand name for an establishment which was only a little superior to a common lodging house, but he guessed it was too late to get a bed at any of the Rowton houses. He walked briskly down Charing Cross Road and into the Strand, crowded with cars and taxis, for the theatres were closing and the northern sidewalk was almost impassable. And then he thought he saw his mother preceding another lady into a car, and stopped. Yes, it was Margaret Dawlish, and the lady with the dirty-gray hair was Aunt Anita. He could afford to grin now, and the discovery was very pleasurable. He could well imagine that if he had seen that party earlier in the evening, the sight would have evoked a sneer and just that twinge of self-pity against which he was trying hard to guard himself.