He hesitated before replying, glancing at her furtively while crumbling his bread. When he did, it was in the tone that one of her younger disciples might have ventured into a discussion with Hypatia. But he stuck to his guns. “Oh, you needn’t look so scared,” laughed the girl, “I haven’t come down to that.” Her voice had changed. It had a note of shrillness. In some indescribable way she had grown coarse. “I’m a kept woman,” she explained. “What else is any woman?”!

She gave Joan a hug and a kiss, and was gone. Joan joined Madge in the kitchen, where she was toasting buns. “Don’t you see it for yourself?” he demanded.

She had gone down to Liverpool, intending to persuade her father to leave the control of the works to Arthur, and to come and live with her in London; but had left without broaching the subject. There were nights when she would trapse the streets till she would almost fall exhausted, rather than face the solitude awaiting her in her own rooms. But so also there were moods when, like some stricken animal, her instinct was to shun all living things. At such times his presence, for all his loving patience, would have been as a knife in her wound. Besides, he would always be there, when escape from herself for a while became an absolute necessity. More and more she had come to regard him as her comforter. Not from anything he ever said or did. Rather, it seemed to her, because that with him she felt no need of words. “I wish you would come oftener,” he said. “Mary has taken such a liking to you. If you care to meet people, we can always whip up somebody of interest.” “No,” admitted Mr. Simson with generosity. “It’s only natural. It’s a fight to the finish between me and the Bourgeois. I cover them with ridicule and contempt and they hit back at me in the only way they know.”