"Is that anything to you?"
George shrugged. "It's nothing to me. Not morally. If a girl wants to live a slightly disreputable life, hanging around with actors, living in sin, that's no concern of mine."
Catriona flushed. "I don't think I'm enamoured of the tone of this conversation. I didn't accept your invitation so that you could make cheesy remarks about my private life. Anyway, I know dozens of perfectly reputable girls who live with their boyfriends. Well, quite a few, anyway."
George came across with her drink and held it up for her. "I'm not being critical. Don't get me wrong. It's just a little difficult for old fogies like me to get used to the modern age, that's all. When I was first stepping out with girls, remember, it was pretty scandalous if they smoked, even in private. You smoke anywhere you feel like it. And some of those clothes you wear well—well, they're pretty scandalous, even for today. You're a new kind of girl, and it takes a while for people like me to get used to the idea."
He sat on the largest chair in the room, a huge Olympian throne, without offering her a seat. He sipped his drink and then said, "Another thing that throws me off balance is your interest in business—coupled with the fact that you own so much of Keys Shipping. In my day, girls left business to the men. What did a girl know about buying and selling? It wasn't their world. A girl's world was all dances and tea parties and strawberries and cream."
"You have a very over-romanticised notion of the female sex," Catriona told him, sitting down on the end of a deep black velvet sofa. "At least, you have a very romanticised notion of the girls in London. I can't speak for Cheltenham or Oxford or anywhere else. I expect the girls there are still as fresh and goody-goody as you'd like to imagine them. Dances and tea-parties and frocks down to their ankles. And all virgins."
George drank and smoked and nodded reflectively. "I suppose they are. Well, I know they are. It's the same in America, in all the proper middle-class suburbs. Well-painted homes, shiny new Packards, and daughters who never listened to nigger music and walk down the aisle with their hymens intact. It has to be that way. That's what makes capitalism strong."
"I'm not sure that I follow you," said Catriona. "What makes capitalism strong? The well-painted houses or the intact hymens?"
George looked at her. She could tell that he was slightly surprised that a girl could say the word "hymens" out loud, even a sophisticated flapper like her.
"Well," he said, in a slow voice, "you have to remember that a country which bases its strength on capitalism needs a stable base, a middle class of moderately well off professional people who not only desire the products that capitalist industries offer them, but have the money and the credit to pay for them, and are satisfied with what they've got when they've got it—although not too satisfied not to hanker after next year's model. And the way to keep this middle-class base secure is to fix the prices of everything they want, from a spanking new automobile to a college education for their kids, at exactly the right level, so that they can just afford them if they're thrifty, and if they work hard, but never have too much money left over. It's that exact income-to-desire ratio that keeps a capitalist system functioning, and expanding. It has to be finely tuned. If people have too much free cash, they suddenly realise that they don't have to work so hard, and that they can afford booze and gambling and messing around with women not their wives. Homes break up, efficiency at work starts to suffer, moral codes crumble, people start asking awkward political questions. The economy loses its whole meaning and its whole momentum. Happiness, in a capitalist system, is always having not quite enough. That's why I believe in well-painted homes, and intact hymens, and non-union labour, and why I think that short skirts and jazz and bootleg liquor are the first signs of America's coming financial collapse."
"You drink liquor yourself. And you've invited a girl in a short skirt not your wife into your stateroom, alone, for cocktails."
"I'm different, my dear; just like most of the cabin-class passengers on this luxury tub of yours are different. We all have sufficient money to be both publicly moral and privately licentious at the same time. Not many middle-class folk can afford such extravagance."
Catriona sipped her cold gin and then said, "What do you think of me, really?"
"What do I think of you?" George repeated.
"I get the distinct feeling that you're trying to say something to me, or about me, and I'm not sure what it is. I don't know whether you disapprove of me because you think I'm a flapper, and because I drink gin and smoke cigarettes, and have love affairs with men—which I can assure you is quite usual, these days, especially if he's somebody you care for—or whether you're simply saying that you're a little old-fashioned and you haven't quite got the hang of me yet. Or whether you're saying—"
George raised his hand and shook it quickly, to tell her that she shouldn't say any more. "You're a social phenomenon, that's what I think of you," he said. "At least, you're part of a social phenomenon. if I appear to be talking my way around the bushes to get to the trees, it's only because I'm like a hunter who doesn't really understand the nature of the animal which he is stalking. When Edgar told me about you... Well, I knew your father, and I expected something different."
"A virgin."
"I didn't mean that. I see you're going to tease me with that for the rest of the voyage. I meant, I expected a girl who was going to be more conventional. Less free, less outspoken. Less worldly, but perhaps more practical, the way Northern girls usually are."
"You thought I was going to wear glasses, and sensible tweed suits and be able to train red setters with one hand, while baking leek and lamb pudding with the other?"
George smiled and then laughed. Then, more because she wanted to make him move out of his chair than because she actually wanted one, Catriona asked him, "Would you light me a cigarette, please?"
He opened a silver box of Abdullas and brought it over. He watched her with that same curious young/old expression as she took one and held it between her lips. She had a disturbing feeling that he found the gesture erotic. Nigel had once told her about a German friend of his who would pay ten pounds just to watch a woman, naked except for black silk stockings, sit on a bentwood chair and smoke a cigarette. And Welterman was a German sort of a name.
"Have you thought any more about my offer to buy up the Keys fleet?" asked George, lighting Catriona's cigarette.
"Not really. There's no rush, is there? Not that I'm aware of."
"You understand that I would quite like to be able to know that I can count on your support."
Catriona smoked for a while without answering. George Welterman disturbed her even more than Edgar. At least she was sure that whatever games Edgar was playing, he had the best interests of Keys Shipping at heart, and the interests of all those poor families in Liverpool who depended on Keys so much for a living. But George was enticing her out like a deep-sea fisherman who had hooked the hair of a mermaid, out into the cold waters of real risk, both personal and financial. And the question was: did he want this particular mermaid for her alluring human form, or did he want her because he could sell her tail for $2.50 the pound in the best fishmonger's? She couldn't tell; and despite the extraordinary frankness with which he spoke of love and sex and Myrtle Greensleeves, George wasn't giving any clues away at all. He had been angling these waters all his life, and they were his own chilly territory. Catriona began to feel the first palpitations of inexperience, even fright.