“So far as regards our work, you certainly are,” she admitted. “Outside it, I do not think that we could ever have much to say to one another.”
“Why not?” he objected, a little sharply. “We’re as close together in our work and aims as any two people could be. Perhaps,” he went on, after a moment’s hesitation and a careful glance around, “I ought to take you into my confidence as regards my personal position.”
“I am not inviting anything of the sort,” she observed, with faint but wasted sarcasm.
“You know me, of course,” he went on, “only as the late manager of a firm of timber merchants and the present elected representative of the allied Timber and Shipbuilding Trades Unions. What you do not know”—a queer note of triumph stealing into his tone “is that I am a wealthy man.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I imagined,” she remarked, “that all Labour leaders were like the Apostles—took no thought for such things.”
“One must always keep one’s eye on the main chance; Miss Abbeway,” he protested, “or how would things be when one came to think of marriage, for instance?”
“Where did your money come from?” she asked bluntly.
Her question was framed simply to direct him from a repulsive subject. His embarrassment, however, afforded her food for future thought.
“I have saved money all my life,” he confided eagerly. “An uncle left me a little. Lately I have speculated—successfully. I don’t want to dwell on this. I only wanted you to understand that if I chose I could cut a very different figure—that my wife wouldn’t have to live in a suburb.”