"It wasn't only that," she managed to go on. "It was the way they looked at the house; the way you apologized for my dress; the way you looked when you tried to get out of answering Barry Lake's questions about what you were doing. Oh, how I despised myself! And how I knew you and they must be despising me!"
"The one thing I felt about you all evening," he said, with the patience that marks the last stage of exasperation, "was pride. I was rather crazily proud of you."
"As my lover you were proud of me," she said. "But the other man—the man that's more truly you—was ashamed, as I was ashamed. Oh, it doesn't matter! Being ashamed won't accomplish anything. But what we'll do is going to accomplish something."
"What do you mean to do?" he asked.
"I want you to tell me first," she said, "how much money we have, and how much we've been spending."
"I don't know," he said stubbornly. "I don't know exactly."
"You've got enough, haven't you, of your own ... I mean, there's enough that comes in every year, to live on, if you didn't earn a cent by practising law? Well, what I want to do, is to live on that. I want to live however and wherever we have to to live on that—out in the suburbs somewhere, or in a flat, so that you will be free; and I can work—be some sort of help. Barry and the others—your real friends, that you really care about, won't mind. And as long as we want to get rid of the other people anyway, that's the way to do it."
"You can wash the dishes and scrub the floors," he supplemented, "and I can carry my lunch to the office with me in a little tin box." He looked at his watch. "And now that the thing's reduced to an absurdity, let's go to bed. It's getting along toward two o'clock."
"You don't have to get to the office till nine to-morrow morning," said Rose. "And I want to talk it out now. And I don't think I said anything that was absurd."
The devil of it was she hadn't. The precise quality about her suggestions that pointed and barbed them, was their fantastic logic. It would be ridiculous—impossible—to uproot their life as she wanted it done. One simply couldn't do such a thing. Serious discussion of it was preposterous. But to explain why ...! He was apt enough at explanations generally. This one seemed to present difficulties.