arvellously stupid and blind British police touched their hats
to them. G.J. smiled at her in silence, aware by experience of the
futility of argument. He knew quite a lot of women who had almost
precisely Christine's attitude towards the war, and quite a lot of men
too. But he could have wished the charming creature to be as desirable
for her intelligence as for her physical and her strange spiritual
charm: he could have wished her not to be providing yet another
specimen of the phenomena of woman repeating herself so monotonously
in the various worlds of London. The simpleton of fifty made in his
soul an effort to be superior, and failed. "What is it that binds me
to her?" he reflected, imagining himself to be on the edge of a divine
mystery, and never expecting that he and Christine were the huge
contrivances of certain active spermatozoa for producing other active
spermatozoa.

Christine did not wonder what bound her to G.J. She knew, though she
had never heard such a word as spermatozoa. She had a violent passion
for him; it would, she feared, be eternal, whereas his passion for her
could not last more than a few years. She knew what the passions of
men were--so she said to herself superiorly. Her passion for him was
in her smile as she smiled back at his silent smile; but in her
smile there was also a convinced apostleship--for she alone was the
repository of the truth concerning Germans, which truth she preached
to an unheeding world. And there was something else in her baffling
smile, namely, a quiet, good-natured, resigned resentment against the
richness of his home. He had treated her always with generosity, and
at any rate with rather more than fairness; he had not attempted to
conceal that he was a man of means; she had nothing to reproach him
with financially. And yet she did reproach him--for having been too
modest. She had a pretty sure instinct for the price of things,
and she knew that this Albany interior must have been very costly;
further, it displayed what she deemed to be the taste of an exclusive
aristocrat. She saw that she had been undervaluing her Gilbert. The
proprietor of this flat would be entitled to seek relations of higher
standing than herself in the ranks of _cocotterie_; he would be
justified in spending far more money on a girl than he had spent on
her. He was indeed something of a fraud with his exaggerated English
horror of parade. And he lived by himself, save for servants; he was