“When you have recovered from your stupefaction,” said she, calmly, “will you look over that line of figures, and then give a glance at this total? After that I will ask you what fortune could stand it.”
“This looks formidable, indeed,” said he, poring over the page through his spectacles.
“It is worse, Peter. It is formidable.”
“After all, Dinah, this is expenditure. Now for the incomings!”
“I suspect you 'll have to ask your prime minister for them. Perhaps he may vouchsafe to tell you how many twenty-pound notes have gone to America, who it was that consigned a cargo of new potatoes to Liverpool, and what amount he invested in yarn at the last fair of Graigue? and when you have learned these facts, you will know all you are ever likely to know of your profits!” I have no means of conveying the intense scorn with which she uttered the last word of this speech.
“And he told me—not a week back—that we were going on famously!”
“Why wouldn't he? I 'd like to hear what else he could say. Famously, indeed, for him with a strong balance in the savings-bank, and a gold watch—yes, Peter, a gold watch—in his pocket. This is no delusion, nor illusion, or whatever you call it, of mine, but a fact,—a downright fact.”
“He has been toiling hard many a year for it, Dinah, don't forget that.”
“I believe you want to drive me mad, Peter. You know these are things that I can't bear, and that's the reason you say them. Toil, indeed! I never saw him do anything except sit on a gate at the Lock Meadows, with a pipe in his mouth; and if you asked him what he was there for, it was a 'track' he was watching, a 'dog-fox that went by every afternoon to the turnip field.' Very great toil that was!”
“There was n't an earth-stopper like him in the three next counties; and if I was to have a pack of foxhounds tomorrow—”