“I would not like it,” she answered after a pause.
He might have known what her answer would be, Cutter reflected bitterly. His face reddened. His anger was rising.
“Why? Do you want to live there?” she asked, feeling this silence directed against her.
“Oh, it makes no difference what I want, because if we lived on separate planets you could not differ more widely than you do from my way of life and my desires, my very needs,” he exclaimed.
This was unjust, she knew. Still she felt guilty.
“George, I can’t pretend that I should like to live in New York, but if you want to go there, I will go. I must not stand ever in the way of your success.”
He sat in brooding, bitter silence, staring into the fire.
“We might live very quietly; at least I could, couldn’t I?” she asked timidly, ready to make every other concession.
“No; you could not. You’d have to play the game as other women do. You would not do that. You—your whole mind is against the idea—you would not adjust yourself. You would not even try to adjust yourself to the world as it is. You want to make one yourself, six hundred feet long and seven hundred feet wide with this house in the middle of it. You have done it. Look at it,” he exclaimed, with a glance that swept this room like a conflagration.
This was the first time she had suspected that the parlor was not furnished according to his liking. She was that simple, and he had been that patient.