now. He's got you taped pretty well and knew that
if he worked on your sympathies you'd do his work while he miked about.
The working class is always like that--no backbone."

She wondered if he were joking, but she saw from his solemn face that he
meant it all, and she gathered that he considered himself very much
better than Knollys. He did not see the contemptuous amusement in her
face, and went on, stammering a little because he had at last brought
himself to say something that had been on his mind for days.

He lit a cigarette nervously, fumbled with a bunch of keys in his
trousers pocket and then, looking at her dirty hands, said:

"L-l-look here, old girl. I d-don't w-want to quarrel with you. But I
w-want you to f-face things a bit. Y-you s-see--you've been used to a
class of society quite different from mine. You know--look here, I say,
I don't want you to go making _faux pas_."

"What do you mean?" she asked ominously.

"That's French for mistakes, don't you know--mistakes in--er--well, what
one might call breeding, don't you know. Y-you know--associating with
stewards and--and--common people like Jimmy, for instance. He's the very
lowest bourgeois type."

"Much lower, I suppose, than Ole Fred, and those drinkers in New
Zealand, isn't he?" she said calmly, her eyes glinting. He flushed hotly
and looked hurt. Immediately she was sorry.

"There, I'm sorry, Louis. I ought not to have said a thing like that. It
was unforgivable. But you do talk like an idiot. How on earth can one
make mistakes in breeding? Oh, you and I talk different languages,
that's all, and it's not any use at all trying to think and talk the
same."

"Well, I know more of the world than you do, and you must let me teach
you, Marcella. Oh, I know you're--you're braver and stronger morally
than I. But, you know, when we get to Sydney and are married we'll have
to stay in hotels and--and--I don't want my wife making _faux pas_. It'd
be just like you--you're such a dear, really--to go doing things
servants ought to do--in public, I mean, and make a fool of me."

She looked at him and smiled reminiscently and rather cruelly. But he
looked so solemn, so serious that, in sheer mischief, she told him that
she would be very careful not to make him conspicuous by her blunders.
And then she asked him an unexpected question.

"Louis, did you write and tell your father you didn't want any more
money?"

He took out his packet of cigarettes--he