“Don’t you see where I am! How there is nothing and nobody—Don’t you see?”
“Yes, I see,” he answered. “You are quite right. There is nothing and nobody. I have been to Lawdor myself.”
“You have been to talk to him?”
“Yesterday. That was my reason for coming here. He will not see you or be written to. He says he knows better than to begin that sort of thing. It may be that family feeling has not the vogue it once had, but you may recall that your husband infuriated him years ago. Also England is a less certain quantity than it once was—and the man has a family. He will allow you a hundred a year but there he draws the line.”
“A hundred a year!” Feather breathed. From her delicate shoulders hung floating scarf-like sleeves of black transparency and she lifted one of them and held it out like a night moth’s wing—“This cost forty pounds,” she said, her voice quite faint and low. “A good nurse would cost forty! A cook—and a footman and a maid—and a coachman—and the brougham—I don’t know how much they would cost. Oh-h!”
She drooped forward upon her sofa and laid face downward on a cushion—slim, exquisite in line, lost in despair.
The effect produced was that she gave herself into his hands. He felt as well as saw it and considered. She had no suggestion to offer, no reserve. There she was.
“It is an incredible sort of situation,” he said in an even, low-pitched tone rather as if he were thinking aloud, “but it is baldly real. It is actually simple. In a street in Mayfair a woman and child might—” He hesitated a second and a wailed word came forth from the cushion.
“Starve!”
He moved slightly and continued.