"With a title and two mortgaged places, and every penny left to the girl. Esmé, if you can't pull in we must give up London."
"Not until London gives me up," she flashed out. "Leave me my own affairs, Bertie. If I make a bit it doesn't hurt you. You don't have to pay then."
"You're mad, Butterfly," he answered, "to dream of living by backing horses. Look here! Nothing's ever been the same since I went away that time. Esmé, we're young. Let's start again." He came nearer her.
If he had taken her in his arms she might have fought down the restless demon of anger and resentment which was tearing at her. But he did not touch her.
"Start in a sand castle by the sea," she mocked, "with limpets for friends and neighbours." And then suddenly her self-control gave way. She burst out hysterically and told him he wanted to make her miserable, to imprison her in the country; cried tears of sheer peevish temper; swore that all the world's luck was against her; that she had no pleasure, no real fun; that even a few rags paid for by herself were grudged to her.
After a little Bertie turned away, went out so quietly that she did not hear him go, and left Esmé raving in an empty room, until Marie with a tabloid came to soothe and comfort.
Bertie walked swiftly across London, up through the roar of Piccadilly, with its motor monsters, diving, stopping, rushing, with its endless flight of taxis, its horse vans out of place in the turmoil. It was cold, a thin rain falling; he walked on to narrower streets, and came to the grey, dull square where Estelle lived with her aunt. It was London at its dreariest; smoke-stained old houses, blinking out at a smoke-grimed, railed-in square. A few messengers delivering meat at area doors, a few tradesmen's carts standing about, now and then a taxi gliding through, spurning the thin slime of the quiet street. Decorous, old-fashioned carriages were drawn up at some of the doors, with large horses poking miserably at their bearing reins, and getting their mouths chucked as they did it by obese and self-satisfied coachmen. The self-centred life of a colony of quiet people was making its monotonous way from free lighting to lights out. People who lived next door and never knew each other, who revolved in their own little circles and called it living. Perhaps lived as happily as others, since to each their own life and drawing of breath.
"Was Miss Reynolds in? Yes?"
Estelle was dusting the china in the big, brown-hued drawing-room, an appalling museum of early Victorian atrocities, with efforts of the newer arts which followed the cumbrous solidity; pieces of black and gold, plush monkeys clinging to worked curtains, fret-work brackets and tables covered with velvet sandwiched in here and there.
Estelle dusted an offensive bronze clock with positive loathing. It was a gouty effigy of Time, clinging to his scythe because he must have fallen without it, and mournfully accepting the hour-glass set in his chest, which held a loudly-ticking clock of flighty opinions and habits; evidently, judging by his soured expression, a cross to the holder. Two large vases containing dyed pampas grass guarded each end of the mantelpiece; two others held everlastings.