“How is Lizzie?” I said then, dropping my voice.
“Don’t talk of her,” repeated Bevere, in a tone of despair; despair if I ever heard it. It shut me up.
“Johnny, I’m nearly done over; sick of it all,” he went on. “You don’t know what I have to bear.”
“Still—as regards yourself, you might pull up,” I persisted, for to give in to him, and his mood and his ways, would never do. “You might if you chose, Bevere.”
“I suppose I might, if I had any hope. But there’s none; none. People tell us that as we make our bed so we must lie upon it. I made mine in an awful fashion years ago, and I must pay the penalty.”
“I gather from this—forgive me, Bevere—that you and your wife don’t get along together.”
“Get along! Things with her are worse than you may think for. She—she—well, she has not done her best to turn out well. Heaven knows I’d have tried my best; the thing was done, and nothing else was left for us: but she has not let me. We are something like cat-and-dog now, and I am not living with her.”
“No!”
“That is, I inhabit other lodgings. She is at the old place. I am with a medical man in Bloomsbury, you know. It was necessary for me to be near him, and six months ago I went. Lizzie acquiesced in that; the matter was obvious. I sometimes go to see her; staying, perhaps, from Saturday to Monday, and come away cursing myself.”
“Don’t. Don’t, Bevere.”