"That's right," he said briefly. "Proper treatment will bring you round sooner, I expect."
"I like Dr. Dymock," she said timidly.
"He's not a bad sort."
A silence ensued. How difficult it was to find things to say. Virginia made another effort. "Grover is so kind, she waits on me hand and foot!"
"It's her work to wait on you. What she's paid for. I don't know why you should call her kind."
"Don't you know," she asked earnestly, "the difference between the work you can pay for and the work you can't? Oh, but I am sure you must."
He grunted. Evidently he was not interested, but bored. She offered him more tea, and refrained from further efforts at talk, remembering his sneer at her "prattle."
They were too utterly out of sympathy for her to have any idea of how best to approach him.
He drank his second cup of tea in silence, his gaze travelling over the room, over the dressing-table with its dainty appointments, over the white silk kimono, embroidered in faintly coloured flowers, which his bride wore. The loose sleeve revealed the thinness of her arm and wrist, which her dresses had formerly more or less concealed. On her white flesh he remarked a row of round purple marks. Had she rubbed her arm on something dirty? What could have caused those stains? They looked like finger-marks. The memory of yesterday—of their tussle, and his snatching of the letter from her desperate grip—came suddenly to him.
Could it be true that he, Osbert Gaunt, with the upbringing and traditions of a gentleman, had left the marks of his hands upon a fragile girl? Self-disgust turned him for a moment almost sick.