Her hand remained motionless for a moment, and then she drew it away.
“Don’t say that. Tod’s quite worthy of me,” she answered. “He’s a first-rate fellow, but you never liked him, and so you never appreciated his good points. He’s not good-looking, and that’s made people misunderstand him.”
Gault smothered a groan, and she went on:
“You asked me why I wanted to marry at all. There’s nothing else for a woman in my position to do. I’m not bright. I can’t do anything like writing, or painting, or making statues. All I do now is to help Maud when she has dinners, and talk to the dull people. And you know”—her voice dropping to a key of naïve confidence—“I sometimes feel that I’d like to have a home of my own—a house where I could do just what I liked, and have the sort of people I liked to dinner. Maud doesn’t care for the kind of people I do.”
“Why don’t you have it, then? You’re of age; you’re financially independent. You can do exactly what you like. You seem to forget that this is the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.”
“No, I don’t forget; but that doesn’t make it any easier for me. I can’t go off and live all by myself. And think what a fuss Mortimer and Maud would make! It would drive Maud crazy if I did that. People would say I’d quarreled with her, and she can’t stand people saying things like that. I don’t like it, either. And it would hurt Mortimer’s feelings dreadfully. He’d think I wasn’t happy with them. You couldn’t make him understand. Besides, I don’t want to live in a house of my own all alone. I’d die of the blues. Think how dismal I’d be with nobody but servants and Chinamen!”
Gault looked out of the window near him and made no immediate response. The appearance of squalor which marked the street was intensified by the rain, which was now falling heavily. Already the pavements shone with the greasiness of well-tramped mud. Miserable pedestrians, without umbrellas and in scanty clothes, stood under the dripping projections before show-windows, looking out with yellow, dejected faces. Others plodded drearily onward, their heads lowered against the descending flood. Women passed, with bare, red hands gripping at their sodden skirts. In the depths of the dark interiors Gault had seen so often, lights were being kindled that shone like small red sparks in the thick, smothering gloom. Without turning from the window, he said:
“But why marry Tod? If you want liberty, a larger and more independent life, why not choose some one else?”
Letitia was silent for a moment. Then she said in rather an offended tone: