He shivered, coughed a little, and then broke silence.

“Then if you know, there’s no use in continuing this discussion,” he said curtly.

“Not for me, perhaps, but there is for you,” she replied.  “Shall I tell you what I know?”

“No,” he said in a voice slightly raised.

“No?” she asked, her round eyes earnestly on him.

“No.”

Again he was getting out of patience with her; again he was conscious of the strain.  Her devotion and fidelity and love plagued him; she was only humiliating both herself and him.  It would have been bad enough had he ever, by word or deed, given her cause for thus fastening herself on him ... but there; that was the worst of that kind of life for a woman.  Women such as she, business women, in and out of offices all the time, always, whether they realised it or not, made comradeship a cover for something else.  They accepted the unconventional status, came and went freely, as men did, were honestly taken by men at their own valuation—­and then it turned out to be the other thing after all, and they went and fell in love.  No wonder there was gossip in shops and squares and public houses!  In a sense the gossipers were in the right of it.  Independent, yet not efficient; with some of womanhood’s graces forgone, and yet with all the woman’s hunger and need; half sophisticated, yet not wise; Oleron was tired of it all....

And it was time he told her so.

“I suppose,” he said tremblingly, looking down between his knees, “I suppose the real trouble is in the life women who earn their own living are obliged to lead.”

He could not tell in what sense she took the lame generality; she merely replied, “I suppose so.”

“It can’t be helped,” he continued, “but you do sacrifice a good deal.”

She agreed:  a good deal; and then she added after a moment, “What, for instance?”

“You may or may not be gradually attaining a new status, but you’re in a false position to-day.”

It was very likely, she said; she hadn’t thought of it much in that light—­

“And,” he continued desperately, “you’re bound to suffer.  Your most innocent acts are misunderstood; motives you never dreamed of are attributed to you; and in the end it comes to—­” he hesitated a moment and then took the plunge, “—­to the sidelong look and the leer.”

She took his meaning with perfect ease.  She merely shivered a little as she pronounced the name.

“Barrett?”

His silence told her the rest.

Anything further that was to be said must come from her.  It came as the bus stopped at a stage and fresh passengers mounted the stairs.

“You’d better get down here and go back, Paul,” she said.  “I understand perfectly—­perfectly.  It isn’t Barrett.  You’d be able to deal with Barrett.  It’s merely convenient for you to say it’s Barrett.  I know what it is ... but you said I wasn’t to tell you that.  Very well.  But before you go let me tell you why I came up this morning.”