“No,” she muttered sulkily. “I’m not the sort of woman that makes a lot of friends. I expect people don’t like me, as a rule.”
“You’re the sort of woman that behaves like a blooming infant!” he said. “Supposing I don’t help you? What then, I keep asking you? How shall you get money? You can only borrow it—and there’s nobody but Janet, and she’d have to ask her father for it. Of course, if you’d sooner borrow from Osmond Orgreave than from me—”
“I don’t want to borrow from any one,” she protested.
“Then you want to starve! And you want your boy to starve—or else to live on charity! Why don’t you look facts in the face? You’ll have to look them in the face sooner or later, and the sooner the better. You think you’re doing a fine thing by sitting tight and bearing it, and saying nothing, and keeping it all a secret, until you get pitched into the street! Let me tell you you aren’t.”
Five.
She dropped into a chair by the piano, and rested her elbows on the curved lid of the piano.
“You’re frightfully cruel!” she sobbed, hiding her face.
He fidgeted away to the larger of the two windows, which was bayed, so that the room could boast a view of the sea. On the floor he noticed an open book, pages downwards. He picked it up. It was the poems of Crashaw, an author he had never read but had always been intending to read. Outside, the driver of his cab was bunching up his head and shoulders together under a large umbrella, upon which the rain spattered. The flanks of the resigned horse glistened with rain.
“You needn’t talk about cruelty!” he remarked, staring hard at the signboard of an optician opposite. He could hear the faint clanging of church bells.