It was the old Jane, so familiar. "I wish," said he, with a smile—"I wish I had had your common sense to guide me all these years."
"If you had, you would now be a clerk in the City earning thirty shillings a week."
"And perhaps a happier man."
"Bosh, my dear Paul!" she said, shaking her head slowly. "Rot! Rubbish! I know you too well. You adding up figures at thirty shillings a week, with a common sense wife for I suppose you mean that—mending your socks and rocking the cradle in a second-floor back in Hickney Heath! No, my dear"—she paused for a second or two and her lips twitched oddly—"common sense would have been the death of you."
He laughed in spite of himself. It was so true.
Common sense might have screwed him to a thirty shillings-a-week desk: the fantastic had brought him to that very house, a candidate for Parliament, in a thousand-guinea motor car. On the other hand—and his laughter faded from his eyes—the fantastic in his life was dead. Henceforward common sense would hold him in her cold and unstimulating clasp. He said something of the sort to Jane. Once more she ejaculated "Rot, rubbish and bosh!" and they quarrelled as they had done in their childhood.
"You talk as if I didn't know you inside out, my dear Paul," she said in her clear, unsmiling way. "Listen. All men are donkeys, aren't they?"
"For the sake of argument, I agree."
"Well—there are two kinds of donkeys. One kind is meek and mild and will go wherever it is driven. The other, in order to get along, must always have a bunch of carrots dangling before its eyes. That's you."
"But confound it all!" he cried, "I've lost my carrots—can't you see? I'll never have any carrots again. That's the whole damned tragedy."