He found a certain relief in following these bitterly comic aspects of their case and presently took it up again with: “I am so utterly the man for you and he is so utterly not the man. I don’t mean that I’m big enough or enough worth your while, but at least I could give you something, and I could fight for you. He won’t fight, for you, or for anything.”
“I shall have to do all the fighting if I get him.”
“You want him so that you don’t mind anything else. I see that.”
“Exactly. For a long time I didn’t know how I loved him just because I had always taken all that you are saying for granted, in the funniest, most naïvely conceited way; I took it for granted that I was a very big person and that the man I married must stand for big opportunities. Now, you see,” she finished, “he is my big opportunity.”
He was accepting it all now with no protest. “Next to no money, I suppose?” he questioned simply.
“Next to none, Jim.”
“It means obscurity, unless a man has ambition.”
“It means all the things I’ve always hated.” She smiled a little over these strange old hatreds.
Again a silence fell, and it was again Grainger who broke it.
“You may as well let me have the last drop of gall,” he said. “Own that if it hadn’t been for him you might have come to care for me.”