building on the sand of their own
fancy, not on the rock of general human demand. I hear that that daily
they talked of starting can't come off yet, either.... The chap's a bad
investment, Babs.... And he despises me and my goods, you know. That'll
be awkward.'

'Not you, daddy. The papers, he does. He rather likes you, though he
doesn't approve of you.... He doesn't like mother, and she doesn't like
him. But people often don't get on with their mothers-in-law.'

'It's an awkward alliance, my dear, a very awkward alliance. What will
people say? Besides, he's a Jew.'

Jewish babies; he was thinking of them too.

Jane thought, bother the babies. Perhaps there wouldn't be any, and if
there were, they'd only be a quarter Jew. Anyhow, it wasn't them she
wanted; it was Arthur.

Arthur opened doors and windows. You got to the edge of your own thought,
and then stepped out beyond into his thought. And his thought drove sharp
and hard into space.

But more than this, Jane loved the way his hair grew, and the black line
his eyebrows made across his forehead, and the way he stood, tall and
lean and slouching, and his keen thin face and his long thin hands, and
the way his mouth twisted up when he smiled, and his voice, and the whole
of him. She wondered if he loved her like that--if he turned hot and cold
when he saw her in the distance. She believed that he did love her like
that. He had loved her, as she had loved him, all that time he had
thought she was lying to every one about Oliver's death.

'It isn't what people do,' said Jane, 'that makes one love them or stop
loving them.'

'Is this,' she thought, 'what Clare felt for Oliver? I didn't know it was
like this, or I wouldn't have taken him from her. Poor old Clare.' Could
one love Oliver like that? Any one, Jane supposed, could be loved like
that, by the right person. And people like Clare loved more intensely
than people like her; they felt more, and had fewer other occupations.

Jane hadn't known that she could feel so much about anything as she was
feeling now about Gideon. It was interesting. She wondered how long it
would last, at this pitch.

CHAPTER III

THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD

1

Jane's baby was born in January. As far as babies can be like grown human
beings, it was like its grandfather--a little Potter.

Lord Pinkerton was pleased.

'He shall carry on the papers,' he said, dandling it on his arm.
'Tootooloo, grandson!' He d