“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.
“It hasn’t been balanced since—dear me! not since October,” he said.
“I know; but I draw such small checks.”
“But you draw a good many.”
She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he observed severely:
“You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of—”
“That’s always the way,” she interrupted. “Whenever people look at my check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that there’s no time left for putting it right.”
“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really help you—”
“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went through her like a knife.
The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that his own decreased.