“What did you want me for, please?”
She had been laughing about some of the gardener’s queer names for the roses; her voice suddenly changed, and everything but pain died out of it.
“I believe we are ruined,” she said, facing him, “and Otto made me promise, if ever I wanted advice, I would appeal to you.”
He seemed still to listen, plucking at the nearest leaves, for a moment after she had finished. Then he said, as if speaking to himself,
“Well, I’m very glad, at any rate, that I didn’t ask a holiday for nothing at all.” He glanced up at her anxious face. “Holidays are very rare with us, you know,” he added, apologetically. “I couldn’t soon get leave again.”
“Yet I don’t suppose you can help us,” continued Ursula, relentlessly. “Nobody can.”
“When people get down as low as that,” replied the young clerk, frigidly, “they can usually help themselves. I presume that, however much money you may happen to possess, you want more. That, I believe, is what people of your class call ‘being ruined.’”
She felt that he wronged her the more by this constant distinction, after what she had said on the Manor-house steps. “I possess no money at all,” she said, wroth with herself for the helpless confession. “And in about a week’s time I must have three thousand florins.”
“In other words,” he answered, with an angry wave of his short arm round the greenhouse, “you must spend thirty thousand florins with an income of twenty-seven. Other people have an income of one thousand, and spent that.”
“No,” she replied, “it is not that. We will say no more about it. Come, let us walk on.”