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'Why,' Tietjens said, 'are you giving me all this information?'

'Because,' the girl said, 'it's the way your mind works...It picks up useless facts as silver after you've polished it picks up sulphur vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them...I've never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums, and you work them up again out of bones. That's what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist...'

'I know, of course,' Tietjens said.

'Of course you know,' the girl said. 'You know everything...And you've worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. You want to be a Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you'll never stir a finger except to say I told you so.'

She touched him suddenly on the arm:

'Don't mind me!' she said. 'It's reaction. I'm so happy. I'm so happy.'

He said:

'That's all right! That's all right!' But for a minute or two it wasn't really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities--even merely with the velvet. He added: 'Your mother works you very hard.'

She exclaimed:

'How you understand. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!' She said: 'Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day's work for slips of the pen...And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety...Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother had gone to prison...Oh, I'd have gone mad...Weekdays and Sundays...' She stopped: 'I'm apologizing, really,' she went on. 'Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and It did make you a rather awful figure, you know...and the relief to find you're...oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay...I'd dreaded this drive...I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And if I hadn't let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart...I could still...'

'You couldn't,' Tietjens said. 'You couldn't see the cart.'

They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale...They agreed that they had no responsibilities; and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous...Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea...

Tietjens had said:

'You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse...' She had plunged in...

And he had sat, feeling, he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts--intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he