Eleanor threw out her hands with a gesture of confutation. "And you!" she exclaimed. "Does he believe that you aren't capable of looking after your own interests too?"
"Why me?" Arthur objected.
"Because he has been trying to get you. Oh! manifestly trying to—to add you to his collection," she exclaimed passionately. "It was that that opened my eyes. Until you came, I had hardly a doubt of him. I didn't like the life we lead here. It bored me. I believe I've always hated money—it must have been born in me, if that's possible. But I believed more or less what you do now, that he—looked after them, that his only fault, if anything, was that he looked after them too much.
"And then there was the suggestion of your coming here for a week-end visit. That was something rather exceptional. We'd had old Mr Beddington not long before—it was he who told my grandfather about you—and I remember wondering whether he was beginning to pine for more company or something. And I—I was rather interested in what I heard of you; we talked a little about you once or twice, and one day, after you had accepted the invitation, he threw out a kind of hint that he'd like to keep you here. That bothered me somehow. I'd made some sort of picture of you in my mind, and I—it's difficult to explain exactly—but I didn't like the idea of your—getting like the others. Some silly, romantic school-girl notion or other. I don't know quite why."
She paused and turned back to the window. Her colour had risen again, and Arthur believed that she was embarrassed by her thought of him as the hero of her old dream. How bitterly disappointed she must have been when she had found that her imagined hero had been a mere idler, like the others, willing to slack about and play games, in the hope of a place in the old man's will! Good God, what a poor thing she must have thought him! He looked down and began aimlessly to smooth the carpet with his foot. He felt utterly humiliated and miserable. Without a word of reproach she had exposed the weakness and unworthiness of him; and he could only acknowledge that she was right.
He did not look up at once when she turned back to him and went on. "It was the first time that I had seen the thing happening, if you know what I mean. I could follow all the stages of it. I saw how he let you enjoy the easiness of the life here before he made any sort of offer, and then just dangled it in front of you and tried to make it look as if you would be doing him a favour. Well, that was true enough in a way—you were. But the horrible thing, to me, was that he never paid you any salary. That really opened my eyes more than anything. He believed that you had given up your work at Peckham; that what would mostly likely tempt you away from here was the idea of going to Canada, and he wanted to make that impossible. I know that was it. I'm perfectly certain of it. And on the top of it there came that affair about Hubert's engagement and this fuss over Ken. That finished it for me. Ken isn't really bad. Most young men in his place would have got into debt, and I don't believe that he was the least angry about that. Of course the money to put the debts straight was nothing at all to him. He wouldn't have thought twice about that, but he has just turned Ken out without the least thought for poor Aunt Catherine, who is simply heartbroken about it. I believe Uncle Charles is really more upset, too, than he cares to admit."
"I know. I was talking to him this morning," Arthur put in.
"Well, will you tell me why he does these things if he is not an inhuman, heartless brute?" Eleanor concluded.
Arthur could find no answer to that.