Mr. May studied his own nicely kept hands.
“Well, I don’t see how I can do it under twenty pounds a month. Of course it’s ridiculously low. In America I never accepted less than three hundred dollars a month, and that was my poorest and lowest. But of cauce, England’s not America—more’s the pity.”
But James was shaking his head in a vibrating movement.
“Impossible!” he replied shrewdly. “Impossible! Twenty pounds a month? Impossible. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of it.”
“Then name a figure. Say what you can think of,” retorted Mr. May, rather annoyed by this shrewd, shaking head of a doddering provincial, and by his own sudden collapse into mean subordination.
“I can’t make it more than ten pounds a month,” said James sharply.
“What!” screamed Mr. May. “What am I to live on? What is my wife to live on?”
“I’ve got to make it pay,” said James. “If I’ve got to make it pay, I must keep down expenses at the beginning.”
“No,—on the contrary. You must be prepared to spend something at the beginning. If you go in a pinch-and-scrape fashion in the beginning, you will get nowhere at all. Ten pounds a month! Why it’s impossible! Ten pounds a month! But how am I to live?”
James’s head still vibrated in a negative fashion. And the two men came to no agreement that morning. Mr. May went home more sick and weary than ever, and took his whiskey more biliously. But James was lit with the light of battle.