She laughed a little harshly. "What a different man you're becoming, Mr. Speed! Before you married Helen you knew perfectly well that she was horribly nervous in front of strangers and that she'd never show off well at rather tiresome society functions. And yet if I or anybody else had dared to suggest that it mattered you'd have been most tremendously indignant. You used to think her nervousness rather charming, in fact." He said, rather pathetically: "You've cornered me, I confess. And I suppose I'd better tell you the real reason. Helen's nervousness doesn't matter to me. It never has mattered and it doesn't matter now. It wasn't that, or rather, that would never have annoyed me but for something infinitely more serious. While I was at home I found out about my appointment at Lavery's." "Well, what about it?" "It was my father got it for me. He interviewed Portway and Ervine and God knows who else." "Well?" "Well?--Do you think I like to be dependent on that sort of help? Do you think I like to remember all the kind things that people at Millstead have said about me, and to feel that they weren't sincere, that they were simply the result of a little of my father's wire-pulling?" She did not answer. "I left home," he went on, "because my father wanted to shove me into a nice comfortable job in a soap-works. I wanted to earn my own living on my own merits. And then, when I manage to get free, he thoughtfully steps in front of me, so to speak, and without my knowing it, makes the path smooth for me!" "What an idealist you are, Mr. Speed!" "What?" "An idealist. So innocent of the world! Personally, I think your father's action extremely kind. And also I regard your own condition as one of babyish innocence. Did you really suppose that an unknown man, aged twenty-three, with a middling degree and only one moderately successful term's experience, would be offered the Mastership of the most important House at Millstead, unless there'd been a little private manœuvring behind the scenes? Did you think that, in the ordinary course of nature, a man like Ervine would be only too willing to set you up in Lavery's with his daughter for a wife?" "Ah, that's it! He wanted me to marry Helen, didn't he?" "My dear man, wasn't it perfectly obvious that he did? All through last summer term you kept meeting her in the school grounds and behaving in a manner for which any other Master would have been instantly sacked, and all he did was to smile and be nice and keep inviting you to dinner!" Speed cried excitedly: "Yes, that's what my father said. He said it was a plant; that Ervine in the end proved himself the cleverer of the two." "Your father told you that?" "No, I overheard it." "Your father, I take it, didn't like Helen?" "He didn't see the best of her. She was so nervous."