"Well—say rooms—you would want three—thirty shillings, I suppose, at the least, and then another thirty for board. That leaves two fifteen for everything else."
"Surely that's a good deal."
"Oh, I don't know; think of one's clothes," and Stephen stares moodily into the fire, with a pricking recollection of a tailor's bill for twenty odd in his drawer at home now.
Then, to remove the impression of selfish extravagance he feels he may have given, he adds:
"And a man wants to give his wife some amusement, and three hundred a year leaves nothing for that."
"Amusement!" the girl repeats, starting up and standing upright, with one elbow just touching the mantelpiece, and the firelight flooding her figure from the slim waist downwards. "What amusement does a woman want if she is in love with the man she is living with? The man himself is her amusement! To watch him when he is occupied, to wait for him when he is away, to nurse him when he is ill—that is her amusement: she does not want any other!"
Stephen stares at the flexible form, and listens to the words that he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she is talking for effect. His general habit was to consider all women mercenary and untrustworthy. Deep in his heart—for he had a heart, though contracted from want of use—lay a hungry desire to be loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of penetration, and blinded him to the girl's character.
He laughs slightly. "You are taking a theatrical view of the whole thing!"
"How do you mean?"
"Oh, well, that the wife really loves her husband and sticks to him through everything, and they pass through unheard-of difficulties together, and so on"; but he adds, with a faint yawn: "I've always noticed that when the money goes the love disappears too. There's no love where there's abject poverty."