"Oh, neither do you—that's the trouble. You can't keep me shut up here all my life, and interfere with everything I want to do, just by saying it's unsuitable."
"I've never interfered with your spending your money as you please."
It was her turn to stare, sincerely wondering. "Mercy, I should hope not, when you've always grudged me every penny of yours!"
"You know it's not because I grudge it. I would gladly take you to Paris if I had the money."
"You can always find the money to spend on this place. Why don't you sell it if it's so fearfully expensive?"
"Sell it? Sell Saint Desert?"
The suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. Without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines.
"Well, why not?" His horror spurred her on. "You might sell some of the things in it anyhow. In America we're not ashamed to sell what we can't afford to keep." Her eyes fell on the storied hangings at his back. "Why, there's a fortune in this one room: you could get anything you chose for those tapestries. And you stand here and tell me you're a pauper!"
His glance followed hers to the tapestries, and then returned to her face. "Ah, you don't understand," he said.
"I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you'd rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather's arm-chairs."