She had handed him a five dollar bill.
“It’s all I have,” she said. “All I have to buy dinner with....”
“What!” he bellowed. “No more? What do you do with what you earn? Eh?”
“I don’t earn very much, Lawrence. And I use it to pay for things——”
He went down and paid the chauffeur. Then he re-entered the room and went over to the table where she was working. He snatched up the card she had been painting—three fat robins on a telephone wire, with nine gold bells underneath bearing the letters of Merry Xmas.
“Painting?” he said. “This is painting, eh? Good God!... This going on in the room with me!... Rosaleen, you are no longer an artist. It’s too blasphemous!”
He picked up her four cherished camel’s hair brushes and snapped them into bits; then he tore up her cards and took up all the debris he had made, together with her paint box and her blocks of paper, and threw it all out of the window.
“Finished!” he said. “Go back to your pots and pans, wench, and leave such matters to your betters!”
III
It had seemed to her sometimes that he was not a human being at all. She was not able to tell what was buffoonery and what was real. If there were anything real in him.... It filled her with despair; she wondered if she had really done him any good. And when she doubted that, there was no foundation left for her life. If it hadn’t helped him, then all her misery was in vain, the terrible years which stretched before her would be filled with a pain quite useless, quite barren.