"If I'm a coward, what are you?" Dauntrey retorted. "You want me to crawl to those people for a few wretched louis, and you're too selfish to stick by me through it all. I've told you I'd go, if you'd go with me."
"I won't!" Eve flung at him. "You ought to be ashamed to ask it. Coward! He's brought us to this, and now he's afraid to do the one thing that can help."
"Please, please, let me go away," pleaded Mary, sick with shame for both, and for herself because she was a witness of the scene. "I oughtn't to be hearing this. I—unless I can do some good——"
"You can go with him, if you want to do good," Eve cut her short almost savagely. "I'm broken—done! But you—you've nothing to ask them for yourself. You might see him through, if he's too weak to go alone. We're down, both of us, in the mud; but you're high up in the world. You're of importance now. Maybe they'd do for you what they wouldn't for one of us."
"I don't know what you mean. I'm in the dark."
"How could she know?" Dauntrey asked his wife, controlling his rage.
"We've lost everything in this beautiful hell," Eve explained sullenly. "Haven't you heard any news of us this last week?"
"No, nothing—nothing."
"It began with a row at a hotel," Eve went on. "I lost my temper—I had the best excuse—but I struck a woman who dared to cut me. There was a scene. Then all the people who were left at our house turned against us and walked off the same day——"
"Yet she says everything is my fault!" Dauntrey threw out his hands with a disclaiming gesture.