‘But you have no money, Marian,’ replied Mrs Yule, miserably.
‘No money? As if I couldn’t borrow a few pounds until all my own comes to me! Dora Milvain can lend me all I shall want; it won’t make the least difference to her. I must have my money very soon now.’
At about half-past eleven Mrs Yule went downstairs, and entered the study.
‘If you are coming to speak about Marian,’ said her husband, turning upon her with savage eyes, ‘you can save your breath. I won’t hear her name mentioned.’
She faltered, but overcame her weakness.
‘You are driving her away from us, Alfred. It isn’t right! Oh, it isn’t right!’
‘If she didn’t go I should, so understand that! And if I go, you have seen the last of me. Make your choice, make your choice!’
He had yielded himself to that perverse frenzy which impels a man to acts and utterances most wildly at conflict with reason. His sense of the monstrous irrationality to which he was committed completed what was begun in him by the bitterness of a great frustration.
‘If I wasn’t a poor, helpless woman,’ replied his wife, sinking upon a chair and crying without raising her hands to her face, ‘I’d go and live with her till she was married, and then make a home for myself. But I haven’t a penny, and I’m too old to earn my own living; I should only be a burden to her.’
‘That shall be no hindrance,’ cried Yule. ‘Go, by all means; you shall have a sufficient allowance as long as I can continue to work, and when I’m past that, your lot will be no harder than mine. Your daughter had the chance of making provision for my old age, at no expense to herself. But that was asking too much of her. Go, by all means, and leave me to make what I can of the rest of my life; perhaps I may save a few years still from the curse brought upon me by my own folly.’