Tommy had gone to the window, and stood looking out into the soft darkness and the noisy street below, his hands in his pockets.
Those tears had somehow a little loosed his speech.
'The beastly thing,' he said drearily, 'is how everything is such a bore, and how it will go on always, just like this.'
Betty did not need him to tell her that that was a bad thing—one of them, but not the chief. She said:
'I know.'
'No; but you can't quite know,' Tommy told her, 'because—because for you it's rather different.'
The quick movement of Betty's hand sent the pence scattering on to the floor, ringing on the bare stone.
'There'll be more than eighty out now,' she said. 'And it's not different; it's quite the same.'
Tommy turned and faced her, pondering, looking at her from under gloomy brows, seeing how she had sunk her chin on to one clenched hand, and was looking down at the pennies on the floor sombrely. He was speculating on her position, how it could be quite the same. She elucidated it a little with, 'It's what one can take that counts ... nothing else.... So it's quite the same.'
Tommy thought it over, and said, 'I see.'