“But it’d be payin’ me for it if—if you’d just let me do it. Don’t you see I want to?”
“I can see that you want to keep me in your debt. I can see that I’d never have another easy moment in my life. Whatever I did, and whoever I married, I should have to owe it to you.”
“Well, couldn’t you—when I owe so much to you?”
“There you go! What do you owe to me? Nothing but getting you into an infernal scrape––”
“Oh, no! It’s not been that at all. You’d have to be me to understand what it has been. It’ll be something to think of all the rest of my life—whatever I do.”
“Yes, and I know how you’ll think of it.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. You couldn’t. It’s nothin’ to you to come into this beautiful house and see its lovely kind of life; but for me––”
“Oh, don’t throw that sort of thing at me,” he flamed out, striding up and down. “Steptoe’s been putting that into your head. He’s strong on the sentimental stuff. You and he are in a conspiracy against me. That’s what it is. It’s a conspiracy. He’s got something up his sleeve—I don’t know what—and he’s using you as his tool. But you don’t come it over me. I’m wise, I am. I’m a fool too. I know it well enough. But I’m not such a fool as to––”
She was frightened. He was going “off the hooks.” She knew the signs of it. This rapid speech, one word leading to another, had always been her mother’s first sign of super-excitement, until it ended in a scream. If he were to scream she would be more terrified than she had ever been in her life. She had never heard a man scream; but then she had never seen a man grow hysterical.