She told him this while he helped her to chicken and ham. He proclaimed her the most wonderful thing in the world.
“Don’t you think I deserve one little day’s holiday in the year? Just a holiday from the talk, talk, talk, the smiling, the wheedling, the scheming, with my brain ever on the alert and seeming to grow bigger and bigger as the night goes on, until it almost bursts my head when I lie down to sleep?”
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
She shrugged her graceful shoulders. “I don’t know. I used to love it. Now I’m beginning to hate it. I was at a wedding a day or two ago—Charlie Haughton and Minnie Lavering—you know whom I mean, don’t you? They haven’t a sixpence between them—and they looked so happy—oh! so damned happy”—her voice broke adorably—“that I nearly wept.”
He neglected his own plateful of chicken and ham and bent forward over the basket between them.
“I’d do anything in the wide world to make you happy, Edna.”
“I know you would,” she smiled. “You’re doing your best now. It’s an excellent best. But it might be better if you fished out the salt.”
While she helped herself daintily from the paper packet which he held out, he laughed, adoring her ever ready trick of switching off the sentimental current.
“Now you are really just a little bit happy, aren’t you?”
She nodded intimately, which emboldened him to say: