“Well,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “I shouldn't be surprised if it was. I hadn't thought of that. But still—why she and my wife could be company for each other.”
“You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,” she told him, in an unexpected flight of metaphor. “Two women cooped up in a lonesome country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself would be—but not much. It's none of my business—but how your wife must hate it!”
He laughed easily. “Ah, that's where you're wrong,” he said. “She doesn't care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the amaryllises—and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. Well, that's her passion. That's what she really loves.”
“That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,” Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother she went on. “Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four customers—ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title, too—and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to occupy themselves with—and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd even do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank God I don't!”
“That's because you don't know anything about the country,” he told her, but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in his own ears. “All you know outside of London is Margate.”
“I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer,” she informed him, crushingly.
Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. “I know what you mean, Lou,” he said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. “I suppose there's a good deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you have too much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never occurred to me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is there to do? We tried a house in London, during the Season——”
“Yes, I saw in the papers you were here,” she said impassively, in comment upon his embarrassed pause.
“I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see me”—he explained with a certain awkwardness—“but bye-gones are all bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one endless procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties; we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well there you are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfordshire, and it's stupid here. Of course one can travel abroad, but that's no good for more than a few months. Of course it would be different if I had something to do. I tell you God's truth, Lou—sometimes I feel as if I was really happier when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot—I really wasn't—but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was.”
She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. “Didn't it ever occur to you to do some good with your money?” she said, with slow bluntness. Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: “I don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes; we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while we were doing it—but I mean outside, in the world at large.”