“That’s all very well for you—for you to talk like that,” she laughed, hiding her disquiet with devilish duplicity under a display of affectionate banter. “You’re going out, but I have to keep shop.”
He was dashed.
“Well, you’ll see later on. I won’t light it now, at any rate. You’ll see later on. Of course you must use your own judgment, my dear,” he added, courteously, judicial, splendidly fair.
“Elsie,” said Violet, peeping into the bathroom on her way upstairs. “Do you really need that geyser full on all the time?” She spoke with nervous exasperation.
“Well, ’m—”
“I don’t know what your master will say when he sees the gas-bill that’s come in this very moment. I really don’t. I daren’t show it him.” She warningly produced the impeachment.
“Well, ’m, I must make the water hot.”
“Yes, I know. But please do be as careful as you can.”
“Well, ’m, I’ve nearly finished.” And Elsie dramatically turned off the gas-tap of the geyser.
The gloomy bathroom was like a tropic, and the heat very damp. Linen hung sodden and heavy along the line. The panes of the open window were obscured by steam. The walls trickled with condensed steam. And Elsie’s face and arms were like bedewed beetroot. But to Violet the excessive warmth was very pleasant.
“You didn’t have any tea this morning,” said she, for she had noticed that nobody had been into the kitchen before herself.
“No, ’m. It’s no use. If I’m to get through with my work Monday mornings I can’t waste my time getting my tea. And that’s all about it, ’m.”
Elsie, her brow puckered, seemed to be actually accusing her mistress of trying to tempt her from the path of virtue. The contract between employers and employed in that house had long since passed, so far as the employed was concerned, far beyond the plane of the commercial. The employers gave £20 a year; the employed gave all her existence, faculties, energy; and gave them with passion, without reserve open or secret, without reason, sublimely.
“It’s her affair,” muttered Violet as she mounted to the kitchen to finish preparing breakfast. “It’s her affair. If she chooses to work two hours on a Monday morning on an empty stomach, I can’t help it.” And there followed a shamed little thought: “It saves the gas.”
When the breakfast tray was ready she slipped off her blue apron. At the bedroom door she set the tray down on the floor and went into the bedroom to put on the mantle which she had already worn that morning as a seamstress in bed. Before taking the tray again she called out to Elsie:
“Your breakfast’s all ready for you, Elsie.”
Mr. Earlforward was waiting for her at the dining room table. He wore his overcoat. In this manner, at his instigation, they proved on chilly mornings that they could ignore the outrageous exactions of coal trusts and striking colliers.
“What’s that?” demanded Henry with well-acted indifference as he observed an unusual object on the tray.
“It’s a boiled egg. It’s for you.”
“But I don’t want an egg. I never eat eggs.”
“But I want you to eat this one.” She smiled, cajolingly.
Useless! She was asking too much. He would not eat it.
“It’ll be wasted if you don’t.”
It might be; but he would not be the one to waste it. He calmly ate his bread and margarine, and drank his tea.
“I do think it’s too bad of you, Harry. You’re wasting away,” she protested in a half-broken voice, and added with still more emotion, daringly, defiantly: “And what’s the use of a husband who doesn’t eat enough, I should like to know?”
A fearful silence. Thunder seemed to rumble menacingly round the horizon; nature itself cowered. Henry blushed slightly, pulling at his beard. Then his voice, quiet, bland, soothing, sweet, inexorable:
“Up to thirty, eat as much as you can. After thirty, as much as you want. After fifty, as little as you can do with.”
“But you aren’t fifty!”
“No. But I eat as much as I want. I’m the only judge of how much I want. We’re all different. My health is quite good.”
“You’re thinner.”
“I was getting stout.”
“I prefer you to be a bit stout—much. It’s a good sign in a man.”
“Question of taste,” he said with a humorous, affectionate glance at her.
“Oh, Harry!” she exclaimed violently. “You’re a funny man.” Then she laughed.
The storm had dissipated itself, save in Violet’s heart. She knew by instinct, by intuition, beyond any doubt, that Henry deprived himself in order to lessen the cost of housekeeping—and this although by agreement she paid half the cost out of her separate income! The fact was, Henry was just as jealous of her income as of his own. She trembled for the future. Then for safety, for relief, she yielded to him in her heart; she trusted; her hope was in the extraordinary strength of his character.
Mr. Earlforward ate little, but he would seldom hurry over a meal. At breakfast he would drink several cups of tea, each succeeding one weaker and colder than the last, and would dally at some length with each. He was neither idle nor unconscientious about his work; all that could be charged against him was leisureliness and a disinclination to begin; no urgency would quicken him, because he was seriously convinced that he would get through all right; as a rule, his conviction was justified; he did get through all right, and even when he didn’t nothing grave seemed to result. He loved to pick his teeth, even after a meal which was no meal. One of the graces of the table was a little wineglass containing toothpicks; he fashioned these instruments himself out of spent matches. He would calmly and reflectively pick his teeth while trains left stations without him and bargains escaped him. Violet, actuated by both duty and desire, would sit with him at meals until he finally nerved himself to the great decision of
