In the morning she was her usual jolly self again, but it was harder for him.
That had been the beginning. Later there had been more and more quarrels—when she had bought things they couldn’t afford, or, in one of her fits of repentant economy, had insisted upon going shabby.
“What do you care at all what people will be saying?” she would say, when he protested.
For she never cared. She came of a good family; her father had been aid-de-camp to the governor of a British colony, but she had never cared.
“No!” she assured him, laughing. “Nobody else cared, either. They all loved me. I could have gone to a ball in a flour sack, and nobody would have cared![Pg 539]”
“But, see here, for my sake, Katherine—”
“I’ll try,” she said, and that same day she bought herself a huge plum-colored velvet hat that appalled him. They had quarreled about that, too.
At first she had only laughed at his criticisms, but as time went on she grew to resent them. In her girlhood, and during her brief time on the stage, no one had criticized her. Every one had loved her.
“And you!” she had cried once. “You’re the one ought to love me best of all, and you do not, Lewis!”
“What about your loving me a little? Won’t you just try?”