“That was not your reason at all. You thought it more in accordance with the family dignity—that is, your dignity—that there should be two servants in your mother’s house.”
Godwin brought his eyes quickly down from the window, and looked at her with a keenness which made her uncomfortable.
“You are unhappy,” he said at last, shortly, and not at all tenderly. “You never used to fish among people’s motives for a mean one like that. You have had some annoyance or disappointment, and, like an unreasoning woman, you visit it on me, because you think you can hurt me. But you shan’t! you shan’t!”
And he put his hands in his pockets, and walked away up the room with a defiant air.
Deborah felt sorry and ashamed. He was quite right, and she knew it.
All women, when they have had their belief in man in the abstract destroyed by the perfidy of one particular individual, like to visit their disappointment and resentment upon some other individual whom they at the bottom of their hearts know that they can implicitly trust. If he had known it, therefore, Deborah’s snappishness, which she reserved for him alone, was only the natural expression of her indignation that he, the man she did not love, was sound to the core, while the man she did love had proved himself a contemptible wretch.
She was not going to own herself in the wrong, though. Oh, no! She bit her lips with a moment’s self-reproach, and then said, quite coldly:
“Whether I am happy or not is, you will admit, my own affair. Whether we keep one servant or twenty is, I admit, yours, since you pay them. But I tell you frankly that I feel much more comfortable with only one, because like that, by careful management and without any pinching, I am saving a large sum out of the money you send mamma, which she means to give you to furnish your house when you marry.”
Of course Deborah knew that she was hurting him, though she would not have owned it.
“How dare you talk of my marrying?” he burst out, almost dancing with rage. “You know I don’t mean to marry; you know you don’t want me to marry.”