"Here I have been working for months, trying how not to be extravagant, and thinking how incompetent I am and how much more advantageous it would have been for you to have married Gertrude. And I come lots cheaper. I really do. Wasn't it funny of us never to have thought of it before?"
He was very angry, but he had to smile. Then by way of correction he reminded her that the servants were getting rather slack. Didn't she think it was about time to haul them up?
She didn't. She didn't like the poor things to feel that they were driven. She liked to see happy faces all around her.
"But they're so unpunctual—those faces," Brodrick said. And while they were on the subject there was the clock. The clock that Gertrude always used to wind, that Brodrick sometimes forgot to wind, but that Jinny never by any chance wound at all.
"I'm happier," said Jane, "when it's not wound."
"But why——" His face was one vast amazement.
"Because," she said, "it chimes. And it strikes the quarters."
He had thought that was the great merit of his incomparable clock.
She seemed incorrigible. Then, miraculously, for two months all went well, really well.
It was not for nothing that Hambleby sold and was selling. The weekly deficit continued, appalling, palpable even to Jane; but she made it up secretly. Secretly, she seemed to save.