by the
respectable as an illicit rival of churches and chapels and a haunt of
dubious characters who, under high-sounding mottoes, were engaged in
the wicked scheme of setting class against class. She had accepted
the general verdict on the Knype Ethical Society. And now she was
confirmed in it. As she gazed at Julian Maldon in that dreadful
interior, chewing apples and brown bread and sucking oranges, only
when he felt hungry, she loathed the Knype Ethical Society. It was
nothing to her that the Knype Ethical Society was responsible for a
religious and majestic act in Julian Maldon--the act of turning over a
new leaf.

"And why did you come up here?"

"Oh, various reasons!" said Julian, with a certain fictitious
nonchalance, beneath which was all his old ferocious domination.
"You see, I didn't get enough exercise before. Lived too close to the
works. In fact, a silly existence. I saw it all plain enough as soon
as I got back from South Africa.... Exercise! What you want is for
your skin to act at least once every day. Don't you think so?" He
seemed to be appealing to her for moral support in some revolutionary
theory.

"Well--I'm sure I don't know."

Julian continued--

"If you ask me, I believe there are some people who never perspire
from one year's end to another. Never! How can they expect to be well?
How can they expect even to be clean? The pores, you know. I've been
reading a lot about it. Well, I walk up here from Knype full speed
every day. Everybody ought to do it. Then I have a bath."

"Oh! Is there a bathroom?"

"No, there isn't," he answered curtly. Then in a tone of apology: "But
I manage. You see, I'm going to save. I was spending too much
down there--furnished rooms. Here I took two rooms--this one and a
kitchen--unfurnished; very much cheaper, of course. I've just fixed
them up temporarily. Little by little they'll be improved. The woman
upstairs comes in for half an hour in the morning and just cleans up
when I'm gone."

"And does your cooking?"

"Not much!" said Julian bravely. "I do that myself. In the first
place, I want very little cooking. Cooking's not natural. And what
bit I do want--well, I have my own ideas about it, I've got a little
pamphlet about rational eating and cooking. You might read it.
Everybody ought to read it."

"I suppose all that sort of thing's very interesting," Rachel remarked
at large, with politeness.

"It is," Julian said emphatically.

Neither of th