“It doesn’t matter how small it is.”
“Eve, dear, please go and fetch me some silver. I should like to subscribe five shillings. May I give it to you, Mrs. Canterton?”
“Thank you so very much. I will send you a receipt.”
Eve had risen and walked off resignedly towards the cottage. It was she who was responsible for all the petty finance of the household, and five shillings were five shillings when one’s income was one hundred pounds a year. It could not be spared from the housekeeping purse, for the money in it was partitioned out to the last penny. Eve went to her own room, and took a green leather purse from the rosewood box on her dressing-table. This purse held such sums as she could save from the sale of occasional small pictures and fashion plates. It contained seventeen shillings at this particular moment. Five shillings were to have gone on paints, ten on a new pair of shoes, and two on some cheap material for a blouse.
She was conscious of making instinctive calculations as she took out two half-crowns. What a number of necessities these two pieces of silver would buy, and the ironical part of it was that she could not paint without paints, or walk without shoes. It struck her as absurd that a fussy fool like this Canterton woman should be able to cause so much charitable inconvenience. Why had she not refused point blank, in spite of her mother’s pleading eyes?
Eve returned to the garden and handed Mrs. Canterton the two half-crowns without a word. It was blackmail levied by a restless craze for incessant charitable activities. Eve would not have grudged it had it gone straight to a fellow-worker in distress, but to give it to this rich woman who went round wringing shillings out of cottagers!
“Thank you so much. Money is always so badly needed.”
Eve agreed with laconic irony.
“It is, isn’t it? Especially when you have to earn it!”
Gertrude Canterton chatted for another five minutes and then rose to go. She shook hands cordially with Mrs. Carfax, and was almost as cordial with Eve. And it was this blind, self-contentment of hers that made her so universally detested. She never knew when people’s bristles were up, and having a hide like leather, she wriggled up and rubbed close, never suspecting that most people were possessed by a savage desire to say some particularly stinging thing that should bite through all the thickness of her egotism.