“I!” Her eyes widened and darkened in genuine surprise. “I don’t think you can very well accuse me of that,” she said.
“Can’t I? In spite of the fact that you are threatening to throw me over?” There was a bantering note in his voice, but his look was wary.
“I must think of myself,” she said. “You forget I have got to make my living.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. But there are more ways than one of doing that.” His look fell suddenly to the trailing honeysuckle at her feet and dwelt there with an odd abstraction. “Surely you can fill in time as I have suggested,” he said. “You won’t be a loser in the end.”
“I like to feel I am standing on firm ground,” said Frances Thorold, and returned to her sketch with an air of finality as though thereby the subject were closed.
Montague took out a cigarette-case and opened it, offering it to her with the same abstracted air.
She shook her head without looking at him. “No, thank you. I’ve never taken to it. I’ve never had time.”
“It seems to me that you have never had time for anything that’s worth doing,” he said, as he took one himself.
“That is true,” she said in her brief way.
There fell a silence between them. Montague leaned upon his elbow smoking, his eyes half-closed, but still curiously fixed upon the long spray of honeysuckle as though the flowers presented to him some problem.