Frederic was startled. Her simplicity and gentleness had sobered him. He had grown so used to swaggering from situation to situation that it was alarming to find this, which should have been the most touching and moving and the most honourable to himself, dissolved by the light touch of sincerity. It was all the more disconcerting, inasmuch as he had made no allowance for change in Annie. In their previous acquaintance she had been as adroit and as eager as he in the game of False Positions, which is the principal occupation of human beings all the world over. He had taken her rejection of his proffered assistance as another move in the game, and lo!—here she was simply ignoring the past and out of a purely general sort of friendliness allowing him to see her son, and when he had seen, requesting him to go! He was humiliated, but still so astonished that, though all his desire was to play upon her pity and so to drag her back to the old footing, he could not find words keen enough for his purpose. He heaved great sighs and fixed her with sorrowful and yearning eyes, but she gazed only at the child, busied herself with his bed, put up her hand to the gas jet and waited until Frederic was out of the room before she turned it low.
He waited for her in the passage.
“Tell me,” he said, “how you are off for money. You shall not want. . . .”
“I make my living. I like my work.”
“I couldn’t bear to think of you suffering through me.”
Annie looked at him with that disarming directness that was unfamiliar to him:
“I have suffered,” she said.
Frederic went away.
It was not long before he had persuaded himself that she had deliberately plotted to humiliate him, by meeting his generosity—had he not been generous?—with what he called “beastly pride.” Generosity, in his dual scheme of the world, should find its complement in a grovelling gratitude. Generosity was the prerogative of the male, gratitude the privilege of the female. That a woman should show self-reliance and fling back a man’s generosity, suspect him most of all when he brought gifts, offended him as an indecency . . . After all if the woman does not take her cue from the man where is he? How can he continue to play his part? What becomes of the human drama?