"Spunge be dashed! What's money for? It's no good till it's spent. If he can't spend it on us, who can he spend it on? He always makes out he's fiendishly hard, but he's the most generous idiot ever born." "Yes, you're awfully like him." "I'm not." He was suddenly alive to the marvellous charm of the intimacy of the scene with his wife, in the early summer dawn, in the silent, enchanted house of sleepers, in the disorder of the heaped bedroom. They were alone together, shameless in front of one another, and nobody knew or saw, or could ever know or see. Their relations were unique, the resultant of long custom, of friction, of misunderstanding, of affection, of incomprehensible instincts, of destiny itself. He thought: "I have lived for this sensation, and it is worth living for." Without the slightest movement, she invited him with her strange eyes, and as she did so she was as mysterious as ever she had been. He bent down responsively. She put her hot, clammy hands on his shoulders, and kept his head at a little distance and looked through his eyes into his soul. The letter had dropped to the floor. "I knew you would!" she murmured, and then snatched him to her, and kissed him, and kept her mouth on his. "You didn't," he said, as soon as she loosed him. "I didn't know myself." But he privately admitted that perhaps she did know. She had every fault, but she was intelligent. Constantly he was faced with that fact. She did not understand the significance of the war; she lacked imagination; but her understanding was sometimes terrible. She was devious; but she had a religion. He was her religion. She would cast the god underfoot--and then in a passion of repentance restore it ardently to the sacred niche. She said: "I couldn't have borne it if Everard had gone and you hadn't. But of course you meant to go all the time." That was how she saved his amour-propre. "I always knew you were a genius--" "Oh! Chuck it, kid!" "But you're more, somehow. This business--" "You don't mean joining the Army?" "Yes." "What rot! There's nothing in it. Fellows are doing it everywhere." She smiled superiorly, and then inquired: "How do you join? What are you going to do? Shall you ask Everard?" "Well--" he hesitated. He had no desire to consult Lucas. "Why don't you see Colonel Rannion?" she Suggested. "Jove! That's a scheme. Never thought of him!" Her satisfaction at the answer was childlike, and he was filled with delight that it should be so. They launched themselves into an interminable discussion about every possible arrangement of everything. But in a pause of it he destroyed its tremendous importance by remarking casually: "No hurry, of course. I bet you I shall be kept knocking about here for months." CHAPTER III IN THE MACHINE I