She saw and translated the look on his face.  It was a look of horror.  And at once she made excuses for him to herself.  At once she said to herself that it was no use pretending that her Henry was like other men.  He was not.  He was a dreamer.  He was, at times, amazingly peculiar.  But he was her Henry.  In any other man than her Henry a hesitation to take charge of his wife’s financial affairs would have been ridiculous; it would have been effeminate.  But Henry was Henry.  She was gradually learning that truth.  He was adorable; but he was Henry.  With magnificent strength of mind she collected herself.

“No,” she said cheerfully.  “As they’re my shares, perhaps I’d better go.  Unless we both go!” She encountered his eye again, and added quietly:  “No, I’ll go alone.”

He sighed his relief.  He could not help sighing his relief.

And, after meticulously washing-up and straightening, she departed, and Priam remained solitary with his ideas about married life and the fiscal question.

Alice was assuredly the very mirror of discretion.  Never, since that unanswered query as to savings at the Grand Babylon, had she subjected him to any inquisition concerning money.  Never had she talked of her own means, save in casual phrase now and then to assure him that there was enough.  She had indeed refused banknotes diffidently offered to her by him, telling him to keep them by him till need of them arose.  Never had she discoursed of her own past life, nor led him on to discourse of his.  She was one of those women for whom neither the past nor the future seems to exist—­they are always so occupied with the important present.  He and she had both of them relied on their judgment of character as regarded each other’s worthiness and trustworthiness.  And he was the last man in the world to be a chancellor of the exchequer.  To him, money was a quite uninteresting token that had to pass through your hands.  He had always had enough of it.  He had always had too much of it.  Even at Putney he had had too much of it.  The better part of Henry Leek’s two hundred pounds remained in his pockets, and under his own will he had his pound a week, of which he never spent more than a few shillings.  His distractions were tobacco (which cost him about twopence a day), walking about and enjoying colour effects and the oddities of the streets (which cost him nearly nought), and reading:  there were three shops of Putney where all that is greatest in literature could be bought for fourpence-halfpenny a volume.  Do what he could, he could not read away more than ninepence a week.  He was positively accumulating money.  You may say that he ought to have compelled Alice to accept money.  The idea never occurred to him.  In his scheme of things money had not been a matter of sufficient urgency to necessitate an argument with one’s wife.  She was always welcome to all that he had.

And now suddenly, money acquired urgency in his eyes.  It was most disturbing.  He was not frightened:  he was merely disturbed.  If he had ever known the sensation of wanting money and not being able to obtain it, he would probably have been frightened.  But this sensation was unfamiliar to him.  Not once in his whole career had he hesitated to change gold from fear that the end of gold was at hand.