“I don’t know. It was quite a handsome tip for a café. But I could not take it—from you.”
She did not add that besides her reluctance to take his tip, she had desired to make him recognise her—had wanted to prove to her own satisfaction whether his former omission was intentional or merely the accident he now assured her it had been. She had believed it to be accidental, but at the back of her mind there had lingered a doubt; and the doubt hurt.
“I don’t want you to take tips from any one,” he said. “Promise me... I don’t like the thought of your being offered tips. I don’t like to think of your serving people. It’s ridiculous, perhaps, but I would rather you were still in attendance on that immoral old woman. She was an immoral old woman. I’d like to tell her how her conduct strikes an outsider.”
“I prefer the café,” Brenda said. “At least, there’s a mental freedom. Often I am tired, and frequently I am annoyed; but there’s a sort of liberty... After all, liberty is the best thing in life. And it’s good to get home at night-time,” she added on a softened note.
Home consisted of one room, but in that room her mother waited for her, and that meant everything.
“On the whole,” he said lightly, “you’re a lucky person. I get off at night, but I can’t get home. There’s the ocean between me and all the home I ever knew.”
He described his home to her briefly, and his parentless childhood.
“One day I hope to make a home of my own,” he finished reflectively, and after a brief pause proceeded to unburden himself of his ambitions to her in much the same words as he had confided them to Macfarlane. Then, drawing on his imagination, he enlarged and elaborated his schemes, almost forgetting his audience in the pleasure of thinking out and developing his views of life, evolved in the first instance from Nel’s opinions.
She listened in an attentive silence, which she did not break when he ceased talking. For the life of her she could find nothing to say. It sounded so coldblooded this deliberate purpose of marriage for certain ends, with a definite idea of colonisation, and no thought, it seemed to her, of love or the needs of the girl he would single out for his purpose. She felt the keen breath of disappointment chilling her liking for him.
“You don’t say anything,” he observed, slightly aggrieved. “I don’t believe you are the least interested. You don’t enter into the spirit of Empire building.”