plotting to get the finances
of Europe into their hands?' Her eyes, round and shocked, turned from me
to Hobart.

He lightly waved her to me.

'You must ask Mr. Gideon. The children of Israel are his speciality.'

His dislike of me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold
smile. The Legation's wife (no fool) must have seen it.

I went on talking rubbish to her about the Jews and the finances of
Europe. I don't remember what particular rubbish it was, for I was hardly
aware of it at the time. What I was vividly and intensely and quite
suddenly aware of was that I was on fire with the same anger, dislike,
and contempt that burned in Hobart towards me. I knew that evening that I
hated him, even though I was sitting in his house and smoking his
cigarettes. I wanted to be savagely rude to him. I think that once or
twice I came very near to being so.

Katherine and I went home by the same bus. I grumbled to her about
Hobart all the way. I couldn't help it; the fellow seemed suddenly to
have become a nervous disease to me; I was mentally wriggling and
quivering with him.

Katherine laughed presently, in that queer, silent way of hers.

'Why worry?' she said. '_You've_ not married him.'

'Well, what's marriage?' I returned. 'He's a public danger--he and
his kind.'

Katherine said truly, 'There are so many public dangers. There really
isn't time to get agitated about them all.' Her mind seemed still to be
running on marriage, for she added presently, 'I think he'll find that
he's bitten off rather more than he can chew, in Jane.'

'Jane can go to the devil in her own way,' I said, for I was angry with
Jane too. 'She's married a second-rate fellow for what she thinks he'll
bring her. I dare say she has her reward.... Katherine, I believe that's
the very essence of Potterism--going for things for what they'll bring
you, what they lead to, instead of for the thing-in-itself. Artists care
for the thing-in-itself; Potterites regard things as railway trains,
always going somewhere, getting somewhere. Artists, students, and the
religious--they have the single eye. It's the opposite to the commercial
outlook. Artists will look at a little fishing town or country village,
and find it a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, and leave it to
itself--unless they yield to the devil and paint it or write about it.
Potterites will exploit it, commercialise it, bring the railway to
it--and the thing is spoilt. Oh, the Po