Another reason for her objection to Louis’ overtures to the Old Church was that they increased her suspicion of his snobbishness.  No person nourished from infancy in chapel can bring himself to believe that the chief motive of church-goers is not the snobbish motive of social propriety.  And dissenters are so convinced that, if chapel means salvation in the next world, church means salvation in this, that to this day, regardless of the feelings of their pastors, they will go to church once in their lives—­to get married.  At any rate, Rachel was positively sure that no anxiety about his own soul or about hers had led Louis to join the Old Church.

“Have you been confirmed?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” Louis replied politely.

She did not like that “of course.”

“Shall I have to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” said she, “I can tell you one thing—­I shan’t be.”

IV

Rachel went on—­

“You aren’t really going to throw your money away on those debenture things of Mr. Batchgrew’s, are you?”

Louis now knew the worst, and he had been suspecting it.  Rachel’s tone fully displayed her sentiments, and completed the disclosure that “the little thing” was angry and aggressive. (In his mind Louis regarded her at moments, as “the little thing.”) But his own politeness was so profoundly rooted that practically no phenomenon of rudeness could overthrow it.

“No,” he said, “I’m not going to ‘throw my money away’ on them.”

“That’s all right, then,” she said, affecting not to perceive his drift.  “I thought you were.”

“But I propose to put my money into them, subject to anything you, as a financial expert, may have to say.”

Nervously she had gone to the window and was pretending to straighten a blind.

“I don’t think you need to make fun of me,” she said.  “You think I don’t notice when you make fun of me.  But I do—­always.”

“Look here, young ’un,” Louis suddenly began to cajole, very winningly.

“I’m about as old as you are,” said she, “and perhaps in some ways a bit older.  And I must say I really wonder at you being ready to help Mr. Batchgrew after the way he insulted me in the cinema.”

“Insulted you in the cinema!” Louis cried, genuinely startled, and then somewhat hurt because Rachel argued like a woman instead of like a man.  In reflecting upon the excellences of Rachel he had often said to himself that her unique charm consisted in the fact that she combined the attractiveness of woman with the powerful commonsense of man.  In common with a whole enthusiastic army of young husbands he had been convinced that his wife was the one female creature on earth to whom you could talk as you would to a male.  “Oh!” he murmured.

“Have you forgotten it, then?” she asked coldly.  To herself she was saying:  “Why am I behaving like this?  After all, he’s done no harm yet.”  But she had set out, and she must continue, driven by the terrible fear of what he might do.  She stared at the blind.  Through a slit of window at one side of it she could see the lamp-post and the iron kerb of the pavement.