“Who was that woman shouting?”
“Nay, I canna tell thee. To somebody, I’s’d think,” replied Harry. Fanny looked at him, but asked no more.
He was a fair-haired fellow of thirty-two, with a fair moustache. He was broad in his speech, and looked like a foundry-hand, which he was. But women always liked him. There was something of a mother’s lad about him—something warm and playful and really sensitive.
He had his attractions even for Fanny. What she rebelled against so bitterly was that he had no sort of ambition. He was a moulder, but of very commonplace skill. He was thirty-two years old, and hadn’t saved twenty pounds. She would have to provide the money for the home. He didn’t care. He just didn’t care. He had no initiative at all. He had no vices—no obvious ones. But he was just indifferent, spending as he went, and not caring. Yet he did not look happy. She remembered his face in the fire-glow: something haunted, abstracted about it. As he sat there eating his pork pie, bulging his cheek out, she felt he was like a doom to her. And she raged against the doom of him. It wasn’t that he was gross. His way was common, almost on purpose. But he himself wasn’t really common. For instance, his food was not particularly important to him, he was not greedy. He had a charm, too, particularly for women, with his blondness and his sensitiveness and his way of making a woman feel that she was a higher being. But Fanny knew him, knew the peculiar obstinate limitedness of him, that would nearly send her mad.
He stayed till about half past nine. She went to the door with him.
“When are you coming up?” he said, jerking his head in the direction, presumably, of his own home.
“I’ll come tomorrow afternoon,” she said brightly. Between Fanny and Mrs. Goodall, his mother, there was naturally no love lost.
Again she gave him an awkward little kiss, and said good-night.
“You can’t wonder, you know, child, if he doesn’t seem so very keen,” said her aunt. “It’s your own fault.”
“Oh, Aunt, I couldn’t stand him when he was keen. I can do with him a lot better as he is.”