"Why will you be so cruel?" he exclaimed. "It is you who are unjust now. If I'm awkward, it is because you're so curt. You have all the right on your side, and I have the weight of the past on me. You asked me why I spoke to you: if you had been less to me than you were—if, I had thought about you less than I have—I shouldn't have spoken. You might understand the position is a very hard one for me; I am altogether at your mercy, and you show me none."
The hands in her lap trembled a little, and after a pause she said in a low voice:
"You expect more from me than is possible; I've suffered too much."
"My trouble has been worse. Ah! don't smile like that; it has been far worse! You've, anyhow, had the solace of knowing you've been illused; I've felt all the time that my bed was of my own making and that I behaved like a blackguard. Whatever I have to put up with I deserve, I'm quite aware of it; but the knowledge makes it all the beastlier. My life isn't idyllic, Mary; if it weren't for the child——Upon my soul, the only moments I get rid of my worries are when I'm playing with the child, or when I'm drunk!"
"Your marriage hasn't been happy?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"We don't fight; we don't throw the furniture at each other and have the landlady up, like—what was their name?—the Whittacombes. But we don't find the days too short to say all we've got to tell each other, she and I; and——Oh, you can't think what a dreadful thing it is to be in front of a woman all day long that you haven't got anything to say to—it's awful! And she can't act and she doesn't get engagements, and it makes her peevish. She might get shopped along with me for small parts—in fact, she did once or twice—but that doesn't satisfy her; she wants to go on playing lead, and now that the money's gone she can't. She thinks I mismanaged the damned money and advised her badly. She hadn't been doing anything for a year till the spring, and then she went out with Laura Henderson to New York. Poor enough terms they are for America! But she's been grumbling so much that I believe she'd go on as an Extra now, rather than nothing, so long as I wasn't playing lead to another woman in the same crowd."
She traced an imaginary pattern with her finger on the seat. He was still standing, and suddenly his face lighted up.
"There's Archie!" he said.
"Archie?"