Their eyes met, and there was singularly little tenderness in their
eyes.
"It was priced at thirteen," said Marjorie, ending a pause, and with a
sinking heart.
Trafford had left her side. He walked to the window and sat down in a
chair.
"I think this is too much," he said, and his voice had disagreeable
notes in it she had never heard before. "I have just been earning two
guineas at Croydon, of all places, administering comminuted science to
fools--and here I find--this exploit! Ten guineas' worth of picture. To
say we can't afford it is just to waste a mild expression. It's--mad
extravagance. It's waste of money--it's--oh!--monstrous disloyalty.
Disloyalty!" He stared resentful at the cheerful, unhesitating daubs of
the picture for a moment. Its affected carelessness goaded him to fresh
words. He spoke in a tone of absolute hostility. "I think this winds me
up to something," he said. "You'll have to give up your cheque-book,
Marjorie."
"Give up my cheque-book!"
He looked up at her and nodded. There was a warm flush in her cheeks,
her lips panted apart, and tears of disappointment and vexation were
shining beautifully in her eyes. She mingled the quality of an
indignant woman with the distress and unreasonable resentment of a
child.
"Because I've bought this picture?"
"Can we go on like this?" he asked, and felt how miserably he had
bungled in opening this question that had been in his mind so long.
"But it's _beautiful!_" she said.
He disregarded that. He felt now that he had to go on with these
long-premeditated expostulations. He was tired and dusty from his
third-class carriage, his spirit was tired and dusty, and he said what
he had to say without either breadth or power, an undignified statement
of personal grievances, a mere complaint of the burthen of work that
falls upon a man. That she missed the high aim in him, and all sense of
the greatness they were losing had vanished from his thoughts. He had
too heavy a share of the common burthen, and she pressed upon him
unthinkingly; that was all he could say. He girded at her with a bitter
and loveless truth; it was none the less cruel that in her heart she
knew these things he said were true. But he went beyond justice--as
every quarrelling human being does; he called the things she had bought
and the harmonies she had created, "this litter and rubbish for which I
am wasting my life." That stabbed into her pride acutely and deeply. She
knew anyhow that it wasn't so simple and crude as that. It was not mere
witlessness she contributed to their trouble. She tried to indicate her
sense of that. But she had no power of ordered reasoning, she made
futile interruptions, she was inexpressive of anything but emotion, she
felt gagged against his flow of indignant, hostile words. They blistered
her.
Suddenly she went to her little desk in the corner, unlocked it with
trembling hands, snatched her cheque-book out of a heap of still
unsettled bills, and having locked that anti-climax safe away again,
turned upon him. "Here it is," she said, and stood poised for a moment.
Then she flung down the little narrow grey cover--nearly empty, it was,
of cheques, on the floor before him.
"Take it," she cried, "take it. I never asked you to give it me."
A memory of Orta and its reeds and sunshine and love rose like a
luminous mist between them....
She ran weeping from the room.
He leapt to his feet as the door closed. "Marjorie!" he cried.
But she did not hear him....