He gave a bark of laughter. “A lot of use you’d have been! By God, I don’t know how I came to tie myself up to such a poor creature!”
She was silent, her colour fluctuating nervously. He observed this sign of agitation with open satisfaction. “Lily-livered, that’s what you are,” he said. “You’ve got no spirit. Eugene’s little cat of a wife’s worth a dozen of you.”
She said imploringly: “I can’t bear quarrelling, Adam.”
“My first wife would have cut my face open with her riding-whip for half of what you take lying down,” he taunted her.
She was aware that he would like her better for storming at him; she was unable to do it: she would never all her life long, overcome her sick dread of being shouted at by a loud, angry voice. With her genius for saying the wrong thing, she faltered: “I’m different, Adam."
He burst out laughing in good earnest at that, throwing his head back, so that his laughter seemed to reverberate from the painted ceiling of his preposterous bed. To Faith’s ears, it held a note of savage gloating. She rested her thin hands on the arms of her chair, and sat tense, flushing. “Different!” he ejaculated. “By God, you are! Look at Rachel’s brats, and at that whelp of yours!”
Her flush died, leaving her cheeks very pale. She looked anxiously at him. She thought that of course she should have known that he would attack Clay.
He shifted his bulk in bed, so that he was able to look more directly at her. “Well,” he said abruptly, “I can’t discover that that precious son of yours is doing any good at Cambridge, or likely to.”
It was true that Clay’s University career had been, so far, disappointing, but he had not, to her knowledge, disgraced himself in any way, and she could hardly suppose that scholastic attainments would have interested his father. She said: “I don’t know what you mean. I’m sur —”
“I mean it’s a waste of money keeping him there,” Penhallow interrupted. “He’s wasting his time, that’s what he’s doing!”