“Some people don’t mind, and the rest get used to it. I’m not like that. I want to do things. It isn’t enough just to earn your living. A navvy can do that. A horse does that, or a pony down in a mine.”
“What else can you do?”
“You can fight against darkness, and ugliness, and cruelty, and everything that makes life horrible and ugly and terrifying for children.”
“Oh! for children!”
“Yes. You don’t know what my childhood has been like . . .” And he drew a rapid picture of the loneliness of an imaginative child in a dark unhappy house where no love was. “Even now I’m often afraid of the dark stairs up to the attic where I sleep.”
“Please, please,” said Annette, “don’t talk of it any more. It has all been so dark, and it is so lovely here.”
“It’s odd, but I’ve never talked like that to . . .”
He, like Annette, could not force Gertrude’s name to his lips.
She began to gather the knives and forks. Then she stopped and looked at him. Their eyes met for a second, then his turned away.
“Well?” he said.