nst my chest with an effect of physical
compulsion, and cried, "Come in!"

"Our talk's just getting interesting," he protested; and there
entered Miss Ramell, an elderly little young lady who was mighty
in Church help in Clayton.

He greeted her--she took no notice of me--and went to his bureau,
and I remained standing by my chair but unable to get out of the
room. "I'm not interrupting?" asked Miss Ramell.

"Not in the least," he said; drew out the carriers and opened his
desk. I could not help seeing what he did.

I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment
it did not connect at all with the research of the morning that
he was taking out money. I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss
Ramell, and saw only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my
eyes, the small flat drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number
of sovereigns scattered over its floor. "They're so unreasonable,"
complained Miss Ramell. Who could be otherwise in a social
organization that bordered on insanity?

I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow
on the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs,
pipes, and ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think
out before I went to the station?

Of course! My mind made a queer little reluctant leap--it felt like
being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm--and alighted upon the
sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut
his drawer.

"I won't interrupt your talk further," said Miss Ramell, receding
doorward.

Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her
and conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had
the fullest sense of proximity to those--it seemed to me
there must be ten or twelve--sovereigns. . . .

The front door closed and he returned. My chance of escape had
gone.

Section 4

"I MUST be going," I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to
get away out of that room.

"My dear chap!" he insisted, "I can't think of it. Surely--there's
nothing to call you away." Then with an evident desire to shift the
venue of our talk, he asked, "You never told me what you thought
of Burble's little book."

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry
with him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer
and qualify my opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling
of intellectual and social inferiority toward him. He asked what
I though