"You weren't used to it—when your mother cried—and Teddy forked out the money."
"Not to that very thing—but to things like it. If Teddy hadn't forked out the money, we should have worried through somehow. That's the awful thing about it—that if he hadn't done it we shouldn't have been much worse off than we'd been at other times. A little worse—yes—even a good deal, perhaps; and yet we could have lived through it. I couldn't have told you, because people of our kind don't talk about such things, not even with their neighbors. We just take them for granted."
It was this taking it for granted that impressed him with such a sense of the terrible. It left so little room for living, so limited a swing to do anything but scrape. Scraping was the whole of Jennie's history. He could see it as she talked. She had never in her life had fifty dollars to do with as she chose. Perhaps she had never had five. It was not the lack of the money that overwhelmed him, but of any freedom to move, of any scope in which to grow.
Forgetting his reserves of the morning, he caught her by both hands, holding them imprisoned in her lap.
"But that's all over now, Jennie. You're my wife. You're coming to me—right off—to-day—this very afternoon."
"Oh, Bob, I couldn't!" If he was to be "got out of it," she felt it essential to gain time. "I couldn't leave them. Don't you see? There's no one but me to keep house or—or to decide anything. Momma's given up entirely, and Gussie and Gladys are both so young that I couldn't possibly leave them alone."
"Then we'll have to manage it some other way."
"No; not yet. Let's wait. Let's see."
"Waiting and seeing won't change the fact that we're man and wife and that everyone knows it. It's been in the papers—"
"Yes, but why did you put it in?" It was her turn to seek information. "To me it was like a thunderbolt."