“But that’s all over long ago,” he protested amiably.  “Just look how friendly you were with him yourself over supper!  Besides—­”

“Besides what?  I wasn’t friendly.  I was only polite.  I had to be.  Nobody’s called Mr. Batchgrew worse names than you have.  But you forget.  Only I don’t forget.  There’s lots of things I don’t forget, although I don’t make a song about them.  I shan’t forget in a hurry how you let go of my bike without telling me and I fell all over the road.  I know I’m lots more black and blue even than I was.”

If Rachel would but have argued according to his rules of debate, Louis was confident that he could have conducted the affair to a proper issue.  But she would not.  What could he say?  In a flash he saw a vista of, say, forty years of conjugal argument with a woman incapable of reason, and trembled.  Then he looked again, and saw the lines of Rachel’s figure in her delightful short skirt and was reassured.  But still he did not know what to say.  Rachel spared him further cogitation on that particular aspect of the question by turning round and exclaiming, passionately, with a break in her voice—­

“Can’t you see that he’ll swindle you out of the money?”

It seemed to her that the security of their whole future depended on her firmness and strong sagacity at that moment.  She felt herself to be very wise and also, happily, very vigorous.  But at the same time she was afflicted by a kind of despair at the thought that Louis had indeed been, and still was, ready to commit the disastrous folly of confiding money to Thomas Batchgrew for investment.  And as Louis had had a flashing vision of the future, so did Rachel now have such a vision.  But hers was more terrible than his.  Louis foresaw merely vexation.  Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal vigilance on her part and by nothing else—­an instant’s sleepiness, and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne’er-do-well.  She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed.  Strange that a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic, but thus it was!  She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings against Louis which she had been compelled to listen to in the previous year.

“Odd, of course!” said Louis.  “But I can’t exactly see how he’ll swindle me out of the money!  A debenture is a debenture.”

“Is it?”

“Do you know what a debenture is, my child?”

“I don’t need to know what a debenture is, when Mr. Batchgrew’s mixed up in it.”