This was all very illuminating, and the bold advance of Christopher won Mrs. Delafield’s admiration for its manner; but she passed it over to inquire again, “In what way has Niel been making himself impossible?” The more impossible Rhoda depicted him, the easier to leave her there, shut out by his impossibility.
“Why, his meanness,” said Rhoda, her cold, dark eyes, as she turned them upon her aunt, expressing, indeed, quite a righteous depth of reprobation. “For months and months it’s been the same wearisome cry. He’s written about nothing but economy, fussing, fuming, and preaching. It’s so ugly, at his time of life.”
“Have you been a little extravagant, perhaps? Everything is so much more costly, isn’t it? He may well have been anxious about your future, and the child’s.”
It was perfectly mild, and the irony Rhoda would expect from her.
“Oh, no he wasn’t,” said Rhoda, now with her gloomy laugh. “He was anxious about his hunting. I don’t happen to care for that primitive form of amusement, and Niel doesn’t happen to care about anything else; certainly he doesn’t care about beauty, and that’s all I do care about. So in his view, since, precisely, life has become so costly, beauty had to go to the wall and I mustn’t dress decently or have a decently ordered house. I haven’t been in the least extravagant,” said Rhoda. "I’ve known what it is to be cold; I’ve known what it is to be hungry; it’s been, at times, literally impossible to get food and coal in London. Oh, you don’t know anything about it, Aunt Isabel, tucked away comfortably down here with logs and milk. And if Niel had had any appreciation of the position and had realized at all that I prefer being hungry to being ill-dressed, he would have turned his mind to cutting down his own extravagances and offered to allow me"—and now, for an instant, if velvet can show sharpness, Mrs. Delafield caught in the sliding velvet eye an evident edge of cogitation, even, of calculation—“at least two thousand a year for myself. Money buys absolutely nothing nowadays.”
So there it was, and it amounted to an offer. Or, rather, it amounted to saying that it was the sum for which she would be willing to consider any offer of Niel’s. Mrs. Delafield, measuring still Rhoda’s pride against Rhoda’s urgency, mused on her velvet garments, the fur that broadly bordered her skirts, slipped from her shoulders, and framed her hands. Poor Tim had been able to give his daughter only a few hundred a year, and Niel’s hunting must indeed have been in danger. Rhoda’s pride, she knew, stood, as yet, between herself and any pressure from the urgency; she could safely leave the offer to lie and go on presently to question, “And you’ll be better off now?”
Inevitably unsuspecting as she was, Rhoda, all the same, must feel an unexpectedness in her attitude, and at this it was with a full, frank sombreness that she turned her gaze upon her. Anything but a fool she had always been, and she answered, after the moment of gloomy scrutiny, “Don’t imagine, please, Aunt Isabel, that because I speak openly of practical matters I left Niel to get a better establishment. I left him because I didn’t love him. I was willing to sacrifice anything rather than stay. Because it is a sacrifice. I took the step I’ve taken under no illusion. We are too uncivilized yet for things to be anything but difficult for a woman who takes the step, and the brave people have to pay for the cowards and hypocrites.”
This, somehow, was not at all Rhoda’s own note. Mrs. Delafield felt sure she caught an echo of Mr. Darley’s ministrations. She was glad that Rhoda should receive them: they would sustain her; and since she was determined—or almost—that Rhoda should stay with Mr. Darley, it was well that she should receive all the sustainment possible.
“It certainly must require great love and great courage,” she assented.
Rhoda’s eyes still sombrely scrutinized her. “I didn’t expect you to see it, I confess, Aunt, Isabel.”