"Yes," said Estelle, simply. "Only I wouldn't live in London at all. I would make the country my stable meal, my chops and fried potatoes, and London my occasional savoury bonne bouche. I should choke in a town."
Esmé laughed. "How absurd," she flashed out. "Now, be good children. I go to sell pieces of cloth at completely ruinous prices to aid something in distress. I know not what."
"Shall I take you home, Estelle?" Carteret stood looking out into the sunshine. "Lord, what I'd give to live in the country. To see green fields all round and have a horse or two in the winter, and laze over a big log fire when the day was done. But somehow, here, there is never an hour to laze in."
Hugh Carteret, grief stricken, had so far not seen his nephew's wife. Bertie was doing his work, going down occasionally to see the big places and look over the accounts with the stewards.
About a month after he had come back from South Africa, Esmé's first reckoning for extravagance was upon her. Unpaid accounts littered the table. Harrod's deposit was overdrawn. She sat frowning and petulant, as Bertie jotted down totals.
"We can't do it, Esmé; there are all the old bills left unpaid. We managed so well before."
Esmé smoked furiously, flung the thin papers about. People were robbers, her cook a fool.
"But we are not often in. You weren't even at home. It's beyond one, Butterfly; debt won't do. And then your frocks and frills."
"I can pay for those," Esmé was going to say, then stopped. How much of her five hundred, her scant allowance, had she anticipated. Then there would be a visit to Scotland, and she wanted to hunt. She could not spare much of it; fifty of it must go to the French dressmaker, another fifty to a jeweller. "Oh, it's sickening," she flung out in sudden petulant anger. "Sickening. Poverty is too hateful."
Bertie had to listen to an outburst of grumbling, of fretful wrath, because their income was not double its size. To be pinched, cramped when one was young, to be worried by bills, bothered by meannesses.