Mr. Strong smiled. He too, in a sense, was paying out in pennies, and so far quite satisfactorily.
"Well ... take this very crisis," he returned. "Oughtn't there to be a grant, without a moment's loss of time, from the Imperial Exchequer? I'm speaking from quite the lowest point of view—the mere point of view of expediency if you like. Very well. Suppose one or two natives are scoundrels: what about it? Are matters any better because we know that? Don't the poverty and distress exist just the same? And isn't that precisely our opportunity, if only we had a statesman capable of seeing it?... Look here: We've only got to go to them and say, 'We are full of pity and help; here are a lot of—er—lakhs; lakhs of rupees; rupee one and twopence: you may have been foolish, but it isn't for us to cast the first stone; it's the conditions that are wrong; go and get something to eat, and don't forget your real friends by and by.'—Isn't that just the way to bind them to us? By their gratitude, eh? Isn't getting their gratitude better than blowing them from the muzzles of guns, eh? And isn't that the real Empire, of which we all dream? Eh?..."
He warmed up to it, while keeping one ear open for anybody who might come along the passage; and when he found himself running down he grabbed the newspaper again. He doubled it back, refolded it, and again thrust it under Amory's nose.... There! That put it all in a nutshell, he said! The figures spoke for themselves. The Home Government, he said, knew all about it all the time, but of course they came from that hopeless slough of ineptitude that humorists were pleased to call the "governing classes," and that was why they dragged such red herrings across the path of true progress as—well, as the Suffrage, say.... What! Hadn't Amory heard that all this agitation for the Suffrage was secretly fomented by the Government itself? Oh, come, she must know that! Why, of course it was! The Government knew dashed well what they were doing, too! It was a moral certainty that there was somebody behind the scenes actually planning half these outrages! Why? Why, simply because it got 'em popular sympathy when a Minister had his windows smashed or a paper of pepper thrown in his face. They were only too glad to have pepper thrown in their faces, because everybody said what a shame it was, and forgot all about what fools they'd been making of themselves, and when a real—er—crisis came, like this one, people scarcely noticed it.... But potty little intellects like Brimby's and Wilkinson's didn't see as deep as that. It was only Edgar Strong and Amory who saw as deep as that. That was why they, Edgar and Amory, were where they were—leaders of thought, not subordinates....
"Just look rather carefully at those figures," he concluded....
Nevertheless, lofty as these flights were, they had a little lost their thrill for Amory. She had heard them so very, very often. She had trembled in the taxi in vain if this was all that her stealthy coming to the "Novum's" offices meant. Nor had she put on her new sea-holly velvet to be told, however eloquently, that Wilkinson and Brimby were minor lights when compared with Edgar and herself, and that the "Times" was always wrong. Perhaps the figures that Edgar had thrust under her nose as if he had been clapping a muzzle on her meant something to the right person, but they meant nothing to Amory, and she didn't pretend they did. They were man's business; woman's was "visualizing." The two businesses, when you came to think of it, were separate and distinct. Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress's presence? Whoever heard of a man's face launching as much as an up-river punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man's eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making—making—a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now. Even Joan of Arc must have put on her armour, not so much because of all the chopping and banging of maces and things (which must have been very noisy), but more with the idea of inspiring.... Yes, inspiring: that was it. There was a difference. Why, even physically women and men were not the same, and mentally they were just as different. For example, Amory herself wouldn't have liked to blow anybody from the mouth of a gun, but she wasn't sure sometimes that Edgar wouldn't positively enjoy it. He had that hard eye, and square head, and capacity for figures....
She wasn't sure that her heart didn't go out to him all the more because of that puzzle of noughts and dots and rupees he had thrust into her hands....
And so, as he continued (so to speak) to gain time by paying in pennies, and to keep an ear disengaged for the passage, it came about that Edgar Strong actually overshot himself. The more technical and masculine he became, the more Amory felt that it was fitting and feminine in her not to bother with these things at all, but just to go on inspiring. She still kept her eyes bent over the column of figures, but she was visualizing again. She was visualizing the Channel steamer, and the Latin Quarter, and satiny upper-arms. And the taxi-tremor had returned....
Suddenly she looked softly yet daringly up. She felt that she must be Indian—yet not too Indian.
"And then there's suttee," she said in a low voice.
"Eh?" said Strong. He seemed to scent danger. "Abolished," he said shortly.