as an artificial
oversoul can be, with Jessie. But either she was the profoundest of
coquettes or she had not the slightest element of Passion (with a large
P) in her composition. It warred with all his ideas of himself and the
feminine mind to think that under their flattering circumstances she
really could be so vitally deficient. He found her persistent coolness,
her more or less evident contempt for himself, exasperating in the
highest degree. He put it to himself that she was enough to provoke
a saint, and tried to think that was piquant and enjoyable, but the
blisters on his vanity asserted themselves. The fact is, he was, under
this standing irritation, getting down to the natural man in himself for
once, and the natural man in himself, in spite of Oxford and the junior
Reviewers' Club, was a Palaeolithic creature of simple tastes and
violent methods. "I'll be level with you yet," ran like a plough through
the soil of his thoughts.

Then there was this infernal detective. Bechamel had told his wife
he was going to Davos to see Carter. To that he had fancied she
was reconciled, but how she would take this exploit was entirely
problematical. She was a woman of peculiar moral views, and she measured
marital infidelity largely by its proximity to herself. Out of her
sight, and more particularly out of the sight of the other women of her
set, vice of the recognised description was, perhaps, permissible to
those contemptible weaklings, men, but this was Evil on the High Roads.
She was bound to make a fuss, and these fusses invariably took the final
form of a tightness of money for Bechamel. Albeit, and he felt it was
heroic of him to resolve so, it was worth doing if it was to be done.
His imagination worked on a kind of matronly Valkyrie, and the noise of
pursuit and vengeance was in the air. The idyll still had the front of
the stage. That accursed detective, it seemed, had been thrown off the
scent, and that, at any rate, gave a night's respite. But things must be
brought to an issue forthwith.

By eight o'clock in the evening, in a little dining-room in the Vicuna
Hotel, Bognor, the crisis had come, and Jessie, flushed and angry in the
face and with her heart sinking, faced him again for her last struggle
with him. He had tricked her this time, effectually, and luck had been
on his side. She was booked as Mrs. Beaumont. Save for her refusal to
enter their room, and her eccentricity of eating with unwashed hands,