'You fool!' she said.
She thought of herself coming down in the world, living in a pokey little house away from the High Street, unable to buy new dresses, unnoticed by the chief people of Blackstable—she who had always held up her head with the best of them!
George and Edith came in, and she told them, hurling contemptuous sarcasms at her husband. He sat looking at them with his pained, unhappy eyes, while they stared back at him as if he were some despicable, noxious beast.
'But why didn't you say how things were going before, father?' George asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders.
'I didn't like to,' he said hoarsely; those cold, angry eyes crushed him; he felt the stupid, useless fool he saw they thought him.
'I don't know what's to be done,' said George.
His wife looked at old Griffith with her hard, grey eyes; the sharpness of her features, the firm, clear complexion, with all softness blown out of it by the east winds, expressed the coldest resolution.
'Father must get Daisy to help; she's got lots of money. She may do it for him.'
Old Griffith broke suddenly out of his apathy.