He rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening eyes. He was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. He had struggled to support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and here he was, living on her, living on Laura. The position was incredible, abominable, but it was his.
She looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung away from his sunken waist.
"Oh," she cried, "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that, when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your own savings that you flung. It was, dear," she insisted.
"Yes, and as I've flung them, I'll have to live on you for a year at least. It all comes back to that."
"I wish you wouldn't come back to it. Can't you see, can't you see," she implored, "how, literally, I'm living on you?"
"If you only did!"
"But I do, I do. In the real things, the things that matter. I cling and suck like a vampire. Why can't you have the courage of your opinions?"
"My opinions? I haven't any. Hence, no doubt, my lack of courage."
"Your convictions, then, whatever you call the things you do have. You think, and I think, that money doesn't matter. You won't even allow that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. Well then, why make such a fuss about it? And what does it matter which of us earns it, or who spends it?"
He seemed to be considering her point. Then he put it violently from him.