“If you came here as a window-cleaner or a lift porter I might be kinder. You’re quite a nice boy,” she went on after a pause, “otherwise I shouldn’t have anything to do with you. But you haven’t begun to learn the elements of life. You’re utterly devoid of the sense of duty or responsibility. Like the criminal, you know. Oh, don’t get angry. I’m talking to you for your good. Pretending to teach idle women worthless dancing isn’t a career for a man. It’s contemptible. Every man—especially nowadays—ought to pull his weight in the world. The war’s not over. The real war is only just beginning. Instead of pulling your weight you think it’s your right to sit on a cushion, a passenger—or a Pekie dog—and let other people pull you.” “You don’t understand——” “Oh, yes I do. One has to live, and at first we take any old means to hand. But you’ve been going on at this for a couple of years and haven’t tried to get out of it. You like it, Bobby——” “I loathe it.” “You don’t,” she went on remorselessly, with her newly acquired knowledge of what a man’s life could be. “All you loathe is the work—especially when it doesn’t bring you in as much money as you want. You hate work.” Resentment gradually growing out of amusement at his presumptuous proposal had wrought her to a pitch of virtuous indignation. Here was this young man, of cultivated manners, intelligent, able-bodied, attractive, rejecting any kind of mission in existence, and—— “Look here, Bobby,” she said, rising from her chair by the tea-table and dominating him with a little gesture, “don’t get up. You sit there. You’ve asked me to marry you, because you think I’m rich. Hold your tongue,” she flashed, as he was about to speak. “I’ll take all the love and that sort of thing for granted. But if I was poor you wouldn’t have thought of it. At the back of your mind you imagine that if I married you, we could lead a life of Percy’s and the Savoy and Monte Carlo and the South Sea Islands, and you needn’t do another stroke of work all your life long.” He leaned forward in his chair protesting eagerly that it wasn’t true. He would marry her to-morrow were she penniless. She had his salvation soul and body in her hands. He hungered for work; but the coils of his present life had a strangle-hold on him. Suddenly he rose and advanced a step towards her. “Listen, Olivia. If you won’t marry me, will you help me in other ways? I’m desperate. You think you know something about the world. But you don’t. I’m up against it. It may mean prison. For the love of God lend me a couple of hundred pounds.” The ugly word prison sent a stab through her heart; but immediately afterwards the common-sense of her Gale ancestry told her either that he was lying, or, if it were true, that he deserved it. She asked coldly: “What have you been doing?” “I can’t tell you,” he said. “You must trust me.” “But I don’t and that is why I can’t lend you two hundred pounds.” “You refuse?”