"So you think--so the world thinks. Yet I have to live in a wadded box like a wax doll. I want to get out of that box--it stifles me, chokes me. I am sick of the tents of Shem, and wish to house under those of Esau. You and I will take the privilege of rank and be eccentric. As pals we'll get on much better than as a Mayfair man and wife of the wrong sort, beyond the borders of this horrid civilisation that is. Buy a yacht, Jim--a tramp hulk with those triple expansion engines you told me about, and let us make for the South Seas. There's a clear path down Channel. Let us explore, let us venture into the Naked Lands and exploit the fringes of the empire. I want to live--to live, you understand. Oh," she cried almost fiercely, "can't you understand?" "No," said Jim, truthfully, and as stolid as ever; "you have your rank to think of, and my name." The fire died out of Leah's eyes, the colour from her face, the ring from her voice; even her figure seemed to dwindle from that of a tragedy queen into a conventional Belgravian wife. Then she laughed shortly, and in a way which Jim did not approve of in his Duchess. "I beg your pardon, Pentland," said Leah, using his title to mark the far recoil. "I took you for a man: you are nothing but a society gramophone." Jim would have resented this contemptuous description, but that she gave him no time to formulate an idea in his slow-thinking brain. With swift steps she left the room and ascended to her boudoir; there, after locking the door, with a strength which disordered the lock, she flung herself face downward on the sofa, and cried quietly, passionately, with that suppressed anger and grief and rage which rends the body and brain so terribly. Jim could not, would not understand. He was what he always had been--the sole Gadarene pig into which a devilkin had not entered. "Can I never put fire into that clay?" sobbed Leah, savagely. Only God could have done that, and she did not believe in God. But the fetish was in her pocket. CHAPTER XXXI