She said, “Then it is money?” Her arms were folded now on the back of the divan and her uncorseted body sagged between the two supports of rump and elbows.
“Quit hounding me.” He reached for the bottle.
“No more drink until you explain.”
He put the bottle down. Another man might have continued the defense for hours, even for days. Beau himself might have gone on fencing for a time, in spite of an inner awareness of inevitable capitulation, save for the fact that he was now far more afraid of another person than of Netta. It was the first time in his life such a thing had happened to him. He took a chair. He lighted a cigarette. He looked at his intent wife and said, “Okay. You brought it on yourself. This time we really are in a jam.”
“I brought it on myself! We are in a jam! Speak for yourself, bright boy!”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “just how bad a jam it is. If I hadn’t borrowed up to the full value on my insurance…!” He pointed his forefinger at his temple, cocked his thumb in a pantomime of shooting himself.
“How much money?” she asked again, unimpressed by his drama.
“Five thousand dollars.”
Netta moaned softly, sagged, slid from the arm of the divan onto the cushions. “Five—
thousand—dollars.” She murmured the words, wept them. “Even one thousand the way we’re fixed…!” Then she screamed, “How in God’s earth do you owe that?”