“It’s better,” he said. “Better than this. It’ll be your money—the allowance you’ll get. Little enough, but you can waste it any way you like. Try to live.”
From behind the kitchen door she took down a heart-breaking fuzzy black cape trimmed with jet, and the disreputable ghost of a hat; she tucked the money he gave her into a tremendous hand-bag and retied the clasps with string. She was not grateful, any more than one is grateful for sunshine; in an inexplicable world these benefits came sometimes upon the just and the unjust. She had had a neighbor, mother of nine children, who had been miraculously sent off to the sea-side for two weeks of rest out of forty years of life; she knew of other things like that. She was only in a hurry to get away before further investigation revealed little weaknesses that might repel the Agent of Society.
Al had gone to his wife about this, and she had been angry.
“Who’s going to finish the floor?” she demanded. “Jennie won’t do that rough work.”
“I don’t care if it’s never finished. I won’t have that sort of thing in my house. It’s just what I’d give my life to put an end to. It’s—”
“I suppose you’d admire me if I did it?”
“Yes, I should,” he answered. “You’re better able to do it than that poor old skeleton.”
“I don’t care much about your admiration,” said Andrée, slowly. “This is your house, is it? Not mine? That’s just the way Father talks. ‘My’ house ... ‘I’ won’t have this and that—”
“I didn’t mean to be arbitrary,” he said, quickly contrite. “Only, don’t you see ...?”
He went on, to explain. Andrée could, as usual, see his point of view, but she didn’t agree.