She objected very strongly, however, when Fenn tried to take her arm on leaving the place, and she withdrew into her own corner of the taxi immediately they had taken their seats.
"You must forgive my prejudices, Mr.Fenn," she said--"my foreign bringing up, perhaps--but I hate being touched." "Oh, come!" he remonstrated.

"No need to be so stand-offish." He tried to hold her hand, an attempt which she skilfully frustrated.
"Really," she insisted earnestly, "this sort of thing does not amuse me.
I avoid it even amongst my own friends." "Am I not a friend ?" he demanded.
"So far as regards our work, you certainly are," she admitted.

"Outside it, I do not think that we could ever have much to say to one another." "Why not ?" he objected, a little sharply.

"We're as close together in our work and aims as any two people could be.

Perhaps," he went on, after a moment's hesitation and a careful glance around, "I ought to take you into my confidence as regards my personal position." "I am not inviting anything of the sort," she observed, with faint but wasted sarcasm.
"You know me, of course," he went on, "only as the late manager of a firm of timber merchants and the present elected representative of the allied Timber and Shipbuilding Trades Unions.