Being in a mood that demanded fanatical thoroughness, Eve played with the ultimate baseness of man, and made herself a candle to the night-flying moths. She repeated the experience twice—once in Regent Street, and once in Leicester Square. Nothing but fanaticism could have made such an experiment possible, and have enabled her to outface her scorn and her disgust. Several men spoke to her, and she dallied with each one for a few seconds before letting him feel her scorn. She spent the last night of her stay in the Bloomsbury hotel sitting in the lounge and listening to three raucous American women who were talking over their travels. They had been to Algiers, Egypt, Italy, the South of France, and of course to Paris. The dominant talker, who had gorgeous yellow hair, not according to Nature, and whose hands were always moving restlessly and showing off their rings, seemed to remember and to identify the various places she had visited by some particular sort of food that she had eaten! “Siena, Siena. Wasn’t that the place, Mina, where we had ravioli?” “Did you go to Ré’s at Monte Carlo? It’s an experience to have eaten at Ré’s.” “I shan’t forget the Nile. The Arab boy made some bad coffee, and I was sick in the stomach.” They went on to describe their various hagglings with hotel-keepers, cabmen, and shop-people, and the yellow-haired lady who wore “nippers” on a very thin-bridged, sharp-pointed nose, had an exhilarating tale to tell of how she had stood out against a Paris taxi-driver over a matter of ten cents. Eve had always heard such lavish tales of American extravagance, that she was surprised to discover in these women the worst sort of meanness, the meanness that contrives to be generous on a few ostentatious occasions by beating all the lesser people’s profits down to vanishing point. She wondered whether these American women with their hard eyes, selfish mouths, and short-fingered, ill-formed, grasping hands were typical of this new hybrid race. It amused her to contrast her own situation with theirs. When to-morrow’s bill was paid, and her box taken to Charing Cross station, she calculated that she would have about twelve pence left in her purse. And she was going to test another aspect of life on those twelve pennies. It would not be ravioli, or luncheon at Ré’s. Eve packed up her box next morning, paid her bill, and drove off to Charing Cross, where she left her box in the cloak-room. She had exactly elevenpence left in her purse, and it was her most serious intention to make these eleven pennies last her for the best part of two days. One thing that she had lost, without noticing it, was her sense of humour. Fanaticism cannot laugh. Had Simeon Stylites glimpsed but for a moment the comic side of his existence, he would have come down off that pillar like a cat off a burning roof.