“Didst thou seriously think as I should buy that there barracks to please thee?”

“Certainly,” she said, courageously.  “Just that—­to please me.”

“I’m right enough where I am,” he asserted, grimly.  “What for should I buy Wilbraham Hall?  What should I do in it?”

“Live in it.”

“Trafalgar-road’s good enough for me.”

“But it isn’t good enough for me,” said she.

“I wouldna’ ha’ minded,” he said, savagely—­“I wouldna’ ha’ minded going into a house a bit bigger, but—­”

“Nothing is big enough for me except Wilbraham Hall,” she said.

He said nothing.  He was furious.  It was her birthday, and he had given her six-and-twenty pounds—­ten shillings a week for a year—­and she had barely kissed him.  And now, instantly after that amazing and mad generosity, she had the face to look cross because he would not buy Wilbraham Hall!  It was inconceivable; it was unutterable.  So he said nothing.

“Why shouldn’t you, after all?” she resumed.  “You’ve got an income of nearly five thousand a year.” (Now he hated her for the mean manner in which she had wormed out of him secrets that previously he had shared with no one.) “You don’t spend the twentieth part of it.  What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?  You’re getting an old man.” (Cold horrors!) “You can’t take it with you when you leave the Five Towns, you know.  Whom shall you leave your money to?  You’ll probably die worth a hundred thousand pounds, at this rate.  You’ll leave it to me, of course.  Because there’s nobody else for you to leave it to.  Why can’t you use it now, instead of wasting it in old stockings?”

“I bank my money, wench,” he hissingly put in.

“Old stockings!” she repeated, loudly.  “We could live splendidly at Wilbraham Hall on two thousand a year, and you would still be saving nearly three thousand a year.”

He said nothing.

“Do you suppose I gave up my position at school in order to live in a poky little hole at eighteen pounds a year?  What do you think I can do with myself all day in Trafalgar-road?  Why, nothing.  There’s no room even for a piano, and so my fingers are stiffening every day.  It’s not life at all.  Naturally, it’s a great privilege,” she pursued, with a vicious inflection that reminded him perfectly of Susan, “for a girl like me to live with an old man like you, all alone, with one servant and no sitting-room.  But some privileges cost too dear.  The fact is, you never think of me at all.” (And he had but just given her six-and-twenty pounds.) “You think you’ve got a cheap housekeeper in me—­but you haven’t.  I’m a very good housekeeper—­especially in a very large house—­but I’m not cheap.”

She spoke as if she had all her life been accustomed to living in vast mansions.  But James knew that, despite her fine friends, she had never lived in anything appreciably larger than his own dwelling.  He knew there was not a house in Sneyd-road, Longshaw, worth more than twenty-five pounds a year.  The whole outbreak was shocking and disgraceful.  He scarcely recognised her.