“What can be worrying her?” he wondered.  “Can it be that she isn’t sure about my money?  Of course she hasn’t the least idea how much I’ve got.  Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole worse than this.”  He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls, stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of disgrace.  That she should have grown to beauty in these infect surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with the material of jewels.  Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory that lay in his arms.  He liked making fantasies about her that were stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her.  Absent-mindedly he went on reassuring her.  “You know, I’ve got quite enough money.  Fortunately the branch of chemistry I’m interested in is of great commercial use, so I get well paid.  Iniquitously well paid, when one considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied science.  We ought to be able to manage quite decently.  My mother’s got her own money, so my income will be all ours.  There’s no reason of that sort why we shouldn’t get married at once.  We’ll have to live in Essex at first.  I’ve got to go and work on Kerith Island.”

She wriggled on his lap.  “What’s that you were saying about science?” she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest.  “Why isn’t pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?”

“Why is she trying to put me off?” he speculated.  “It isn’t a matter of being sure of a decent home.  In fact, she hated my talking about money.  I wonder what it is.”  To let her do what she wanted with the conversation he said aloud, “Oh, because applied science is a mug’s game.  Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge—­the same kind of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a person by being with them all the time and loving them very much.  Applied science is the other sort of marriage.  In it you go through the pockets of knowledge when he’s asleep and take out what you want.  But, dear, I don’t want to talk of that.  I want to know when you’re going to marry me.”

“I hope,” she said quaveringly, “that all your people won’t think I am marrying you for your money.  But then ... if they know you ... they will know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that.”