The rector heard about Yvette’s intimacy with the Eastwoods, and she was somewhat startled by the result. She had thought he wouldn’t care. Verbally, in his would-be humorous fashion, he was so entirely unconventional, such a frightfully good sport. As he said himself, he was a conservative anarchist, which meant, he was like a great many more people, a mere unbeliever. The anarchy extended to his humorous talk, and his secret thinking. The conservatism based on a mongrel fear of the anarchy, controlled every action. His thoughts, secretly, were something to be scared of. Therefore, in his life, he was fanatically afraid of the unconventional.

When his conservatism and his abject sort of fear were uppermost, he always lifted his lip and bared his teeth a little, in a dog-like sneer.

“I hear your latest friends are the half-divorced Mrs. Fawcett and the maquereau Eastwood,” he said to Yvette.

She didn’t know what a maquereau was, but she felt the poison in the rector’s fangs.

“I just know them,” she said. “They’re awfully nice, really. And they’ll be married in about a month’s time.”

The rector looked at her insouciant face with hatred. Somewhere inside him, he was cowed, he had been born cowed. And those who are born cowed are natural slaves, and deep instinct makes them fear with prisonous fear those who might suddenly snap the slave’s collar round their necks.

It was for this reason the rector had so abjectly curled up, who still so abject curled up before She-who-was-Cynthia: because of his slave’s fear of her contempt, the contempt of a born-free nature for a base-born nature.

Yvette too had a free-born quality. She too, one day, would know him, and clap the slave’s collar of her contempt round his neck.

But should she? He would fight to the death, this time, first. The slave in him was cornered this time, like a cornered rat, and with the courage of a cornered rat.

“I suppose they’re your sort!” he sneered.

“Well they are, really,” she said, with that blithe vagueness. “I do like them awfully. They seem so solid, you know, so honest.”

“You’ve got a peculiar notion of honesty!” he sneered. “A young sponge going off with a woman older than himself, so that he can live on her money! The woman leaving her home and her children! I don’t know where you get your idea of honesty. Not from me, I hope. — And you seem to be very well acquainted with them, considering you say you just know them. Where did you meet them?”

“When I was out bicycling. They came along in their car, and we happened to talk. She told me at once who she was, so that I shouldn’t make a mistake. She is honest.”

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