‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I hope your bill will be as heavy as Queen Anne’s; then we shall see how you behave when it comes to paying for it.’
‘But perhaps I have not really decided what I shall order from the shop-keeper?’
‘Oh, well, I neither know nor care,’ replied Kingston savagely. ‘And you don’t seem to have the decent instincts of the real honest buyer, either. From the anarchistic things you were saying a few minutes ago, I should have thought you would have been a shop-lifter, pure and simple, going in and stealing whatever you wanted, without a thought of paying for it.’
This time he had touched her. She flushed.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘When it comes to the big things of life, I am as honest as the day. Love and hope and so on I should expect and intend to pay the top price for—pay it thoroughly to the last farthing, sooner or later. I am only an anarchist in little things. I might steal for a fancy, and assert my individualism for a whim, but really, really, Queen Anne hasn’t a thought of bilking when she orders her crown. Whatever I buy I shall pay good money for, Kingston—pay it ungrudgingly, if I have to die for it.’
Her earnest face, as she turned it to his, burning and eager, had a strange fascination. He turned roughly away towards his wife.
‘We are talking about Anne Boleyn,’ he cried, raising his voice to penetrate Gundred’s attention—‘how she had her fun, and then paid the money.’
‘And nine is twenty-one,’ answered Gundred, completing her sentence in mechanical tones.... ‘What, dear? Oh yes, Anne Boleyn, poor little thing! so dreadfully treated by her husband. The first martyr of the Church of England.... And now, about prunes, mamma?’
Kingston, angry and disappointed, turned again to Isabel. Primly, inscrutably, Queen Anne smiled down upon them from the wall. She had heard about that martyrdom before. She knew better. She had been the martyr of ambition, not of dogma; she sold her life for a crown, not by any means for a faith. And she thought her martyrdom the grander. In her passionate mysterious heart she pondered Isabel’s brave declaration, and wondered whether the modern woman, too, would be content to pay her debt, when the time should come, for the big things she had ordered at the counter of Fate. Beneath the riddle of her smile Kingston and Isabel fell once more a-talking, while across the room Gundred was still ticking off groceries, and exchanging plans of household economy with her mother-in-law.