“What did she expect you to live on?” asked Alvina.
“Nibble a lettuce leaf with her, and drink water from the tap—and then elevate myself with a Bernard Shaw pamphlet. That was the sort of woman she was. All it gave me was gas in the stomach.”
“So overbearing!” said Alvina.
“Oh!” he turned his eyes to heaven, and spread his hands. “I didn’t believe my senses. I didn’t know such people existed. And her friends! Oh the dreadful friends she had—these Fabians! Oh, their eugenics. They wanted to examine my private morals, for eugenic reasons. Oh, you can’t imagine such a state. Worse than the Spanish Inquisition. And I stood it for three years. How I stood it, I don’t know—”
“Now don’t you see her?”
“Never! I never let her know where I am! But I support her, of cauce.”
“And your daughter?”
“Oh, she’s the dearest child in the world. I saw her at a friend’s when I came back from America. Dearest little thing in the world. But of cauce suspicious of me. Treats me as if she didn’t know me—”
“What a pity!”
“Oh—unbearable!” He spread his plump, manicured hands, on one finger of which was a green intaglio ring.