but idleness, frank enjoyment, and the caprice of
the moment. (Its idiomatic phrase for expressing the experience of
gladness, "I sang 'O be joyful,'" alone demonstrates its unwillingness
to rejoice.) She had espoused the hedonistic class (always secretly
envied by the other), and Louis' behaviour as a member of that class
had already begun to disappoint her. Was it fair of him to say in his
conduct: "The fun is over. We must be strictly conventional now"? His
costly caprices for Llandudno and the pleasures of idleness were quite
beside the point.

Another reason for her objection to Louis' overtures to the Old Church
was that they increased her suspicion of his snobbishness. No person
nourished from infancy in chapel can bring himself to believe that
the chief motive of church-goers is not the snobbish motive of social
propriety. And dissenters are so convinced that, if chapel means
salvation in the next world, church means salvation in this, that to
this day, regardless of the feelings of their pastors, they will go
to church once in their lives--to get married. At any rate, Rachel was
positively sure that no anxiety about his own soul or about hers had
led Louis to join the Old Church.

"Have you been confirmed?" she asked.

"Yes, of course," Louis replied politely.

She did not like that "of course."

"Shall I have to be?"

"I don't know."

"Well," said she, "I can tell you one thing--I shan't be."

IV

Rachel went on--

"You aren't really going to throw your money away on those debenture
things of Mr. Batchgrew's, are you?"

Louis now knew the worst, and he had been suspecting it. Rachel's tone
fully displayed her sentiments, and completed the disclosure that "the
little thing" was angry and aggressive. (In his mind Louis regarded
her at moments, as "the little thing.") But his own politeness was
so profoundly rooted that practically no phenomenon of rudeness could
overthrow it.

"No," he said, "I'm not going to 'throw my money away' on them."

"That's all right, then," she said, affecting not to perceive his
drift. "I thought you were."

"But I propose to put my money into them, subject to anything you, as
a financial expert, may have to say."

Nervously she had gone to the window and was pretending to straighten
a blind.

"I don't think you need to make fun of me," she said. "You think I
don't notice when you make fun of me. But I do--always."

"Look here, young 'un," Louis suddenly be