For weeks she had remained happily in the delusion that Prince Louis had been shot in the Tower, and when the awakening came she had instantly decided that the sinister influence of Lord Haldane and naught else must have saved Prince Louis from a just retribution.  She had a vision of England as overrun with innumerable German spies who moved freely at inexpressible speed about the country in high-powered grey automobiles with dazzling headlights, while the marvellously stupid and blind British police touched their hats to them.  G.J. smiled at her in silence, aware by experience of the futility of argument.  He knew quite a lot of women who had almost precisely Christine’s attitude towards the war, and quite a lot of men too.  But he could have wished the charming creature to be as desirable for her intelligence as for her physical and her strange spiritual charm:  he could have wished her not to be providing yet another specimen of the phenomena of woman repeating herself so monotonously in the various worlds of London.  The simpleton of fifty made in his soul an effort to be superior, and failed.  “What is it that binds me to her?” he reflected, imagining himself to be on the edge of a divine mystery, and never expecting that he and Christine were the huge contrivances of certain active spermatozoa for producing other active spermatozoa.

Christine did not wonder what bound her to G.J.  She knew, though she had never heard such a word as spermatozoa.  She had a violent passion for him; it would, she feared, be eternal, whereas his passion for her could not last more than a few years.  She knew what the passions of men were—­so she said to herself superiorly.  Her passion for him was in her smile as she smiled back at his silent smile; but in her smile there was also a convinced apostleship—­for she alone was the repository of the truth concerning Germans, which truth she preached to an unheeding world.  And there was something else in her baffling smile, namely, a quiet, good-natured, resigned resentment against the richness of his home.  He had treated her always with generosity, and at any rate with rather more than fairness; he had not attempted to conceal that he was a man of means; she had nothing to reproach him with financially.  And yet she did reproach him—­for having been too modest.  She had a pretty sure instinct for the price of things, and she knew that this Albany interior must have been very costly; further, it displayed what she deemed to be the taste of an exclusive aristocrat.  She saw that she had been undervaluing her Gilbert.  The proprietor of this flat would be entitled to seek relations of higher standing than herself in the ranks of cocotterie; he would be justified in spending far more money on a girl than he had spent on her.  He was indeed something of a fraud with his exaggerated English horror of parade.  And he lived by himself, save for servants; he was utterly free; and yet for two months he had kept her out of these splendours,