“I'm awfully unhappy, Audrey,” she said. “Everything's wrong, and I don't know why. What have I done? I try and try and things just get worse.”
Audrey was very uncomfortable. She had a guilty feeling that the whole situation, with Natalie pouring out her woes beside her, was indelicate, unbearable.
“But if Clay—” she began.
“Clay! He's absolutely ungrateful. He takes me for granted, and the house for granted. Everything. And if he knows I want a thing, he disapproves at once. I think sometimes he takes a vicious pleasure in thwarting me.”
But as she did not go on, Audrey said nothing. Natalie had raised her veil, and from a gold vanity-case was repairing the damages around her eyes.
“Why don't you find something to do, something to interest you?” Audrey suggested finally.
But Natalie poured out a list of duties that lasted for the last three miles of the trip, ending with the new house.
“Even that has ceased to be a satisfaction,” she finished. “Clayton wants to stop work on it, and cut down all the estimates. It's too awful. First he told me to get anything I liked, and now he says to cut down to nothing. I could just shriek about it.”
“Perhaps that's because we are in the war, now.”
“War or no war, we have to live, don't we? And he thinks I ought to do without the extra man for the car, and the second man in the house, and heaven alone knows what. I'm at the end of my patience.”