“D’you mean to say you won’t marry me?” he asked hoarsely. “Does my great love mean nothing to you at all?”
“One has to think of oneself in those things, don’t one? I shouldn’t mind marrying, but I don’t want to marry if I’m going to be no better off than what I am now. I don’t see the use of it.”
“If you cared for me you wouldn’t think of all that.”
“P’raps not.”
He was silent. He drank a glass of wine in order to get rid of the choking in his throat.
“Look at that girl who’s just going out,” said Mildred. “She got them furs at the Bon Marche at Brixton. I saw them in the window last time I went down there.”
Philip smiled grimly.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked. “It’s true. And I said to my aunt at the time, I wouldn’t buy anything that had been in the window like that, for everyone to know how much you paid for it.”
“I can’t understand you. You make me frightfully unhappy, and in the next breath you talk rot that has nothing to do with what we’re speaking about.”
“You are nasty to me,” she answered, aggrieved. “I can’t help noticing those furs, because I said to my aunt…”