Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/23

Rh that her young partner was a possible source of danger to her own sex. Not to her personally, of course; for herself, somehow, Mrs. Beever was not of her own sex. If she had been a woman—she never thought of herself so loosely—she would, in spite of her age, have doubtless been conscious of peril. She now recognised none in life except that of Paul's marrying wrong, against which she had taken early measures. It would have been a misfortune therefore to feel a flaw in a security otherwise so fine. Was not perhaps the fact that she had a vague sense of exposure for Jean Martle a further motive for her not expatiating to that young lady on Anthony Bream? If any such sense operated, I hasten to add, it operated without Jean's having mentioned that at the Bank he had struck her as formidable.

Let me not fail equally to declare that Mrs. Beever's general suspicion of him, as our sad want of signs for shades and degrees condemns me to call it, rested on nothing in the nature of evidence. If she had ever really uttered it she might have been brought up rather short on the question of grounds. There were certainly, at any rate, no grounds in