He went.
"Ranny, how nice you look!"
Winny herself was looking nice and knew it. She wore a green cotton gown trimmed with white pipings, and a thing she called a Peggy hat that was half a bell and half a bonnet and had diminutive roses sewn on it here and there like buttons.
They were going down the long entrance to the Exhibition, between painted walls, in brilliant illumination, and in publicity that might have been trying if they had had eyes for anything except each other.
Winny's eyes were brimming with joy and tenderness as she looked at him. If she loved the new gray suit, the brown boots, and the Trilby hat, she did not love them more than the shabby blue serge with the place she knew in the lining where she had mended it. All the same, it was impossible to see him in such things without that little breathless thrill of wonder and excitement. There wasn't one man at Earl's Court that night who could compare with Ranny. He made them all look weedy, flabby; pitiful, uninteresting things.
And then, all of a sudden (they were at the paygate), as she looked, astonishment, grief, and anxiety appeared on Winny's face. Something had dismayed her tenderness, dashed her joy. She had seen Ranny take out of his waistcoat pocket gold—not ten shillings, but a whole sovereign. And a dreadful fear awoke in her.
He was going to spend it all.
She knew it, something told her; she could see by the way he smacked it down, careless like. And Winny couldn't bear it; she couldn't bear to think that Ranny, who had pinched and scraped and done without things for years, should go and throw away all that on her!
But anybody could see that he was going to do it, by the strange excitement and abstraction in his eyes, by the way he gathered up the change and took Winny by the arm and walked off with her. His eyes and the close crook of his arm drawing her along with him in his course, the slight leaning of his body toward hers as they went, his stride and the set of his head proclaimed that he had got her, that she couldn't escape, that he meant to go it, that he had the right to spend on her more than he could possibly afford.