When he went to Beth, however, he assumed a very different tone. He entered the room with an air of deep dejection, and found her sitting beside her dressing-table in a white wrapper, reading quietly. She smiled when she saw his pose. It was what she had expected.
"I can't do without that money, Beth, on my word," he began plaintively. "I've been reckoning on it. I wouldn't take it from you, God knows, if I could help it; but I'm sore pressed." He took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, imagining that he still had to deal with the gentle sensitive girl, upon whom he had imposed so long and so successfully.
Beth watched him a moment with contempt, and then she laughed.
"It is no use, friend Daniel," she said in her neat, incisive, straightforward way. "I am not going to take you seriously any more. I am neither to be melted by your convenient tears, nor dismayed by your bogey bills. I have never seen any of those bills, by the way; the next time you mention them, please produce them. Let us be business-like. And in the meantime, just understand, once for all, like a good man, that I am not going to be domineered over by you as if I were a common degraded wife with every spark of spirit and self-respect crushed out of me by one brutal exaction or another. I shall do my duty—do my best to meet your reasonable wishes; but I will submit to no ordering and no sort of exaction." She rose and faced him. "And as we are coming to an understanding," she pursued, "just explain. Why did you tell me that Miss Petterick was to be a paying patient?"
"I never told you anything of the kind," said Dan, losing his head, and lying stupidly in his astonishment.
Beth shrugged her shoulders. "It is your own business," she rejoined—"at least it is you who will have to pay for her entertainment."
She returned to her book as she spoke, and continued to read with apparent calmness.
Now that she had taken up her position, she found herself quite strong enough to hold it against any Dan Maclure or Bertha Petterick. But Beth was being forced into an ugly and vulgar phase, and she knew and resented it, and was filled with dismay. She was taking on something of the colour of her surroundings involuntarily, inevitably, as certain insects do, in self-defence. She had spoken to Dan in his own tone in order to make him understand her; but was it necessary? Surely if she had resisted the impulse to try that weapon, she might have found another as effective, the use of which would not have compromised her gentlehood and lessened her self-esteem. Her dissatisfaction with herself for the part she had played was a cruel ache, and she thanked Heaven for the chance which would mercifully remove her from that evil atmosphere for a while, and prayed for time to reflect, for strength to be her better self. She was angry with herself, and grieved because she had fought Dan with his own weapons, and it did not occur to her for her comfort that she had only done so because he was invulnerable to that which she would naturally have used—earnest, reasonable, calm discussion—and that fight him she must with something, somehow, or sink for ever down to the degraded level required of their wives by husbands of his way of thinking.