He laughed scornfully. "Oh yes, we wanted money. Money's everything. So long as we have money, what does it matter everybody knowing you think me a selfish brute or that——?" He broke off abruptly.
It was clear that he mastered himself only with an effort. "Have you got the book?" he asked with an icy calmness, presently. "I suppose as your husband I've the right to read it?"
She could not answer. Somehow she got to the door, to her own room; unlocked her jewel-case and took from it the loathsome little book in its clean, innocent, green cover: then she went down and handed it without a word to him.
"So this is it?" he said with all Scorn in the words. He opened it at random. "'I am the background,'" he read in slow, cold tones as to a child; "'the background for his work no less than the wall-paper of the one room where he can write; and I must be as quiet.'"
She stood there, thrown back fifteen years, a girl again before her governess: and he little suspected that with those words he was killing all her penitence and injuring her love.
"Anything sounds rubbish if you read it out," she suddenly blazed at him in quite another mood.
He shut the little book with a mild glance of surprise. "Don't let's have any scenes," he said once more. "This has just happened. It's pretty ghastly; don't let's make it worse. You'd better go to bed when you feel tired; I shall just sit and read—I want to know the worst. Don't wait up for me. It'd be rather a mockery to wish each other good-night!"
He moved towards the door. It was the time they always spent together, the best of her day.
She stood by the mantel-piece, leaning for support on it, wondering how any one could be so cruel—and feeling she deserved his cruelty.... It was so awful, put as he had put it: yet she had never meant——
His hand was on the door. She moved a few steps forward.