To reduce to a certain number of pounds this “enough,” when for her anything or nothing would be enough!

“I would rather starve to death in your arms than live another day without you,” is the current running under all her thoughts, and it confuses them and makes it difficult for her to speak.

What shall she answer?  To name a sum too small in his eyes will be as great an error as to name one too large.  He would only think her a silly, sentimental girl, who knows nothing of what she is talking about, and who has no knowledge and appreciation of the responsibilities of life.

Besides, to name a very small income will be to conjure up before his eyes the picture of a mean, pitiful, sordid existence, from which she feels, with painful distinctness, he would turn with disgust.

Poor?  Yes, he has told her that he is poor, and she believes it; but somehow—­by contracting debt, probably—­she thinks, as her keen, observant eyes sweep over him, he manages at present to live and dress as a gentleman.

Those well-cut suits, those patent shoes and expensive cigarettes; these things, she feels instinctively, must be preserved for him, or any form of life would lose its charm.

At the same time, she must mention something that is not hopelessly beyond him.  She recalls her own two hundred; surely, at the least, he must be making one.

“I can hardly say,” she murmured at last, “because personally I think one can live on so very little; but I suppose most people would say—­well, about three hundred pounds a year.”

“Oh! three hundred a year,” he says, stretching out his hand for the tea-cup on a low table beside him.  The tea has grown cold in the discussion of abstract questions.  He takes the cup and sits down deliberately in the corner of the couch opposite her, and stirs the tea slowly.

“How much is that a week?  Five pounds fifteen, isn’t it?  Well, now, go on, see what you can make of it.  Your house—­the smallest—­and servants—­”

“House and servants!” interrupts the girl, “but why have a house and servants at all?”

“I don’t know,” he rejoins curtly, “because the girl generally expects those things when she marries.”

“Not all girls,” she says, and one seems to hear the smile with which she says it in her voice.

“You mean rooms?” he says quickly, with a gleam of pleasure breaking for a moment across his face.

“Well—­say rooms—­you would want three—­thirty shillings, I suppose, at the least, and then another thirty for board.  That leaves two fifteen for everything else.”

“Surely that’s a good deal.”

“Oh, I don’t know; think of one’s clothes,” and Stephen stares moodily into the fire, with a pricking recollection of a tailor’s bill for twenty odd in his drawer at home now.

Then, to remove the impression of selfish extravagance he feels he may have given, he adds: