“I didn’t start them for you and that chap Brumley to play about with,” he amplified. “And now you know about it, Elly.”
The thing had found her unprepared. “As if——” she said at last.
“As if!” he mocked.
She stood quite still staring blankly at this unmanageable situation. He was the first to break silence. He lifted one hand and dropped it again with a dead impact on the arm of his chair. “I got the things,” he said, “and there they are. Anyhow,—they got to be run in a proper way.”
She made no immediate answer. She was seeking desperately for phrases that escaped her. “Do you think,” she began at last. “Do you really think——?”
He stared out of the window. He answered in tones of excessive reasonableness: “I didn’t start these hostels to be run by you and your—friend.” He gave the sentence the quality of an ultimatum, an irreducible minimum.
“He’s my friend,” she explained, “only—because he does work—for the hostels.”
Sir Isaac seemed for a moment to attempt to consider that. Then he relapsed upon his predetermined attitude. “God!” he exclaimed, “but I have been a fool!”
She decided that that must be ignored.
“I care more for those hostels than I care for anything—anything else in the world,” she told him. “I want them to work—I want them to succeed.... And then——”