“The last time I visited you,” he began, “was three months ago.  Your cottage then was furnished as one would expect it to be furnished.  You had a deal dresser, a deal table, one rather hard easy-chair and a very old wicker one.  You had, if I remember rightly, a strip of linoleum upon the floor, and a single rug.  Your flowers were from the hedges and your fruit from the one apple tree in the garden behind.  Your clothes—­am I mistaken about your clothes or are you dressed more expensively?”

“I am dressed more expensively,” she admitted.

“You and I both know the value of these things,” he went on, with a little sweep of the hand.  “We know the value of them because we were once accustomed to them, because we have both since experienced the passionate craving for them or the things they represent.  Chippendale furniture, a Turkey carpet, roses in January, hothouse fruit, Bartolozzi prints, do not march with an income of fifty pounds a year.”

“They do not,” she assented equably.  “All the things which you see here and which you have mentioned, are presents.”

His forefinger shot out with a sudden vigour towards the photograph.

“From him?”

“From Douglas,” she admitted, “from your cousin.”

He took the photograph into his hand, looked at it for a moment, and dashed it into the grate.  The glass of the frame was shivered into a hundred pieces.  The girl only shrugged her shoulders.  She was holding herself in reserve.  As for him, his eyes were hot, there was a dry choking in his throat.  He had passed through many weary and depressed days, struggling always against the grinding monotony of life and his surroundings.  Now for the first time he felt that there was something worse.

“What does it mean?” he asked once more.

She seemed almost to dilate as she answered him.  Her feet were firmly planted upon the ground.  There was a new look in her face, a look of decision.  She was more or less a coward but she felt no fear.  She even leaned a little towards him and looked him in the face.

“It means,” she pronounced slowly, “exactly what it seems to mean.”

The words conveyed horrible things to him, but he was speechless.  He could only wait.

“You and I, Philip,” she continued, “have been—­well, I suppose we should call it engaged—­for three years.  During those three years I have earned, by disgusting and wearisome labour, just enough to keep me alive in a world which has had nothing to offer me but ugliness and discomfort and misery.  You, as you admitted last time we met, have done no better.  You have lived in a garret and gone often hungry to bed.  For three years this has been going on.  All that time I have waited for you to bring something human, something reasonable, something warm into my life, and you have failed.  I have passed, in those three years, from twenty-three to twenty-six.  In three more I shall be in my thirtieth year—­that is to say, the best time of my life will have passed.  You see, I have been thinking, and I have had enough.”