“Isn’t that rather foolish?” he suggested.  “You’ll get wet through.  How far are you going?”

“Hammersmith.”

He had asked the question with such apparent inconsequence that the thought of denying him the information had not occurred to her.  Undoubtedly it was foolish to refuse his offer.  She would get wet through before she reached Hammersmith.  The tarpaulin only covered her skirt, and in the lap that it made was already a pool of water swilling backwards and forwards with the rocking of the ’bus.  Through her mind raced a swift calculation, estimating the benefits she would gain by keeping dry.  They were not many in number, but they entered the balance, dragged down the scales of her decision.  The hat she was wearing—­it was not a best hat—­but some few evenings before, she had retrimmed it; there was matter for consideration in that.  The frame was a good one.  It could be trimmed again and again, so long as it met with those requirements which in Sally’s mind were governed by a vogue of fashion that she followed reverently, though always, perhaps, some few paces in the rear.  A severe wetting might so alter the shape of that frame as to make it for ever unwearable.  Her coat was serge—­short, ending at the waist; the feather boa that clung round her neck, they would inevitably suffer without protection.  For the moment she felt angry with herself.  She hoped almost, since he was there, that he would make his offer again.  It is these little things—­the saving of a feather boa, the destruction of a flimsy hat frame—­that are the seed of big issues.  Every book, as is this, is in its way a study in the evolution of a crisis, the germ of tiny incident which through a thousand stages grows in strength and magnitude until it takes upon itself the stature of some giant event.

The thought of her clothes that had entered Sally’s mind brought her one step further, prepared her for the silent permission she gave him, when he took the vacant seat beside her and shared the umbrella between them.

“By the time you reached Hammersmith,” he said, “you know you’d be soaked.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she replied.

“Probably not—­but it might be the last.”

“How?”

“Influenza—­pneumonia—­congestion of the lungs—­of such are the kingdom of heaven.”

She looked at him quickly—­that sudden look of one who for a moment sees into another and a new mind, as passing some strange house, you look with curious surprise through the unexpectedly opened door into another’s life.  The glance was as quick, as little comprehensive.  Just as within that strange house you see schemes of colour that you would never have thought of, furniture and pictures that are not of your taste at all, so Sally saw for one brief moment the glimpse of a mind that could casually make a jest of death and holy-written things.  A great deal of that servile obedience to the religion in which she had been brought up had been driven out of her by hard work.  You might not get the priesthood to admit it, but religion is a luxury which few of the hard-workers in this world can afford.  But she still maintained that sense of conventional awe which strict religious training drives deep into a receptive mind.