pressure. "I didn't know, then, that it was going
to be the only thing you cared for----"

But for her own sake he would not let her go on. "Some day I shall make
you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But
meanwhile," he urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject,
and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as
yours?"

Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed
chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the
interview.

"I know you think me stupid--but wives are not usually expected to go
into all the details of their husband's business. I have told you to do
whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not enough."

Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical
utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she
spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of
Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was
of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now
recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her
the previous evening.

"I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest
themselves in their husbands' work, and if the mills were mine I should
try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity
that the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled out of his
talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at
Westmore, and I don't see how we can help having the subject come up
between us."

Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though
her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went
on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms,
and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the
question before her.

She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled
letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which
she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.

The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore, besides resulting,
as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's resignation, and in Halford Gaines's
outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger
immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and
Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have