“What’s the matter, darling, is it too much?”
He put his arms across her shoulders in an accustomed gesture.
“No, no, dear. How absurd. I’m as glad as I can be.”
He laughed again, attempting naturalness, and ruffled his hair with a sudden motion of his hand. But she felt the husband slipping from her grasp, turning defiantly before her eyes into the vagrant poet....
XXI
They moved again, the landlord uptown having raised the rent at the expiration of their lease. The new place was in two large, bare rooms four stories up, lighted by gas, and without any kitchen except a small gas stove in a corner and some shelves concealed by a wall-board screen. There was a dilapidated bathroom, and a roof above where she could take the children in good weather. The place was in the Italian quarter and was cheap. The move seemed a logical one to Moira, for it brought them down in the social scale. If they were to be poor, it was better to live with the poor than with the pretentious. And the Italian section was in the Village, of which they had both become incurably fond, and where for many reasons they felt most comfortable.
The house was managed by an Italian woman named Respetti, who had once done odd jobs of sewing for Moira and for whom she felt a strong liking. Mrs. Respetti had appeared to be quite overjoyed to see her again, delighted to hear of her marriage and her children, and had offered to help her look after them when she could. Her willingness in this regard was the deciding factor in Moira’s choice of the house.
She had not been installed there more than a few weeks when Miles finally lost his job outright, an event she had anticipated almost any day since before the birth of her little girl. He made efforts to obtain work of the same kind, but unsuccessfully. He got books for review. He did whatever came along. One day he brought her a check signed by his father. He began shortly afterwards to be somewhat worse than idle, and sought forgetfulness of his troubles in a way to increase them....
Moira had lived to see three men in him: the skylarking poet, the dogged misfit in business, and finally the self-drugged and nearly self-convinced failure. And still the vision of the first one haunted her and she hoped to bring it back to life.
Left to herself, she made friendships in the Village and built up her own income to fairly respectable proportions. She was, at least, preserved from downright anxiety about the children. In her youth at Thornhill, had she witnessed the privations and makeshifts which now made up her life she would have thought them a chapter out of some incredible tale of human misfortune.