Rodkin ... poor little Rodkin with his weak dreadful little life. Weekdays; the unceasing charm of Anglo-Russian speculation, Sundays; boredom and newspapers. Then the week again, business and a City man's cheap adventures. He _had_ behaved well, in spite of Michael's scoldings. It was wonderful, the way the original Jewish spirit came out in him, at every step. His loose life was not Jewish. And it was _really_ comic that he should have been trapped by a girl pretending to be an adventuress. Poor Eleanor, with all her English dreams; just _Rodkin_. But he was a Jew when he hesitated to marry a consumptive, and perfectly a Jew when he decided not to see the child lest he should love it; and also when he hurried down into Sussex the moment it came, to see it, with a huge armful of flowers, for her.... What a scene for the Bible-woman's Hostel. All Eleanor. Her triumph. What other woman would have dared to engage a cubicle and go calmly down without telling them? And a week later she was in the Superintendent's room and all those prim women sewing for her and hiding her and telling everybody she had rheumatic fever. And crying when she came away.... She was right. She justified her actions and came through. And now she's a young married woman in a pretty villa, _near_ the church, and the vicar calls and she won't walk on Southend pier because "one meets one's butcher and baker and candlestick maker." But only because Rodkin is a child-worshipper. And she tolerates him and the child and he is a brow-beaten cowed little slave.... It is tempting to tell the story. A perfect recognisable story of a scheming unscrupulous woman; making one feel virtuous and superior; but only if one simply outlined the facts, leaving out all the inside things. Knowing a story like that from the inside, knowing Eleanor, changed all "scandalous" stories.... They were scandalous only when told? Never when thought of by individuals alone? Speech is technical. Every word. In telling things, technical terms must be used; which never quite apply.... To call Eleanor an adventuress does not describe her. You can only describe her by the original contents of her mind. Her own images; what she sees and thinks. She was an adventuress by the force of her ideals. Like Louise going on the street without telling her young man so that he would not have to pay for her trousseau....