‘You think it was my duty to share such a home as you have at present?’
‘You know it was. And if the choice had lain between that and earning your own livelihood you would have thought that even such a poor home might be made tolerable. There were possibilities in you of better things than will ever come out now.’
There followed a silence. Amy sat with her eyes gloomily fixed on the carpet; Reardon looked about the room, but saw nothing. He had thrown his hat into a chair, and his fingers worked nervously together behind his back.
‘Will you tell me,’ he said at length, ‘how your position is regarded by these friends of yours? I don’t mean your mother and brother, but the people who come to this house.’
‘I have not asked such people for their opinion.’
‘Still, I suppose some sort of explanation has been necessary in your intercourse with them. How have you represented your relations with me?’
‘I can’t see that that concerns you.’
‘In a manner it does. Certainly it matters very little to me how I am thought of by people of this kind, but one doesn’t like to be reviled without cause. Have you allowed it to be supposed that I have made life with me intolerable for you?’
‘No, I have not. You insult me by asking the question, but as you don’t seem to understand feelings of that kind I may as well answer you simply.’
‘Then have you told them the truth? That I became so poor you couldn’t live with me?’