“We have nowhere to go.”
“Nonsense: we have the house to go to. I don’t say it will be very comfortable. Old Sarah is not a cordon bleu.”
“As if I cared about the cooking!”
“But I do,” said Eddy; “and the one that does will naturally have more to suffer than the one that doesn’t; but thank heaven, there’s the club—and I dare say we shall get on. The end of October is not so bad in town. There’s always some theatre open—and a sort of people have come back.”
“Nobody we know—and we have not a penny;—and father will be so angry he will send us nothing. And they are so willing to have us here; why, I heard Mr. Rowland say to you——”
“Never mind what you heard Rowland say,” said Eddy, almost sullenly. “You can stay if you like. But I won’t, and I can’t stop here. Oh! it’s been bad enough to-day! I wouldn’t go through another, not for——” Here he stopped and broke forth into a laugh, which stopped again suddenly, leaving him with a dark and clouded countenance—“a thousand pounds!”
“I don’t understand you, Eddy,” said Rosamond, with an anxious look. “You have not been borrowing money? What do you mean by a thousand pounds?”
“Do you think,” said Eddy with a short laugh, “that any one would lend me a thousand pounds? That shows how little you girls know.”
“If I don’t know, it would be strange,” said Rosamond, with a sigh, “seeing how dreadfully hard it has been to get money since ever I can remember. And there is no telling with people like Mr. Rowland. Didn’t you hear him coming down upon Archie for not giving his money to some one who was ill? Fancy father talking like that to one of us!”
“The circumstances have no analogy,” said Eddy. “In the first place, we have no money to give: and we want hundreds of things that money could buy. Archie and fellows like him are quite different—they want nothing, and they’ve got balances at their bankers; not that he has much of that, poor beggar, after all.”