“And a man wants to give his wife some amusement, and three hundred a year leaves nothing for that.”

“Amusement!” the girl repeats, starting up and standing upright, with one elbow just touching the mantelpiece, and the firelight flooding her figure from the slim waist downwards.  “What amusement does a woman want if she is in love with the man she is living with?  The man himself is her amusement!  To watch him when he is occupied, to wait for him when he is away, to nurse him when he is ill—­that is her amusement:  she does not want any other!”

Stephen stares at the flexible form, and listens to the words that he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she is talking for effect.  His general habit was to consider all women mercenary and untrustworthy.  Deep in his heart—­for he had a heart, though contracted from want of use—­lay a hungry desire to be loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of penetration, and blinded him to the girl’s character.

He laughs slightly.  “You are taking a theatrical view of the whole thing!”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, well, that the wife really loves her husband and sticks to him through everything, and they pass through unheard-of difficulties together, and so on”; but he adds, with a faint yawn:  “I’ve always noticed that when the money goes the love disappears too.  There’s no love where there’s abject poverty.”

“But three hundred a year is not abject poverty,” answers the girl in a quiet tone, not denying his theory for fear of being called again theatrical.

“No,” he admits.  “Oh, it might do very well as long as there were only two; but then, when there are children, it means a nurse, and all sorts of expenses.”

He says the words with a simplicity and directness that makes the girl almost catch her breath.  For these two were not on intimate terms with each other, not even terms of intimate speaking.

Nothing had passed between them yet but the merest society phrases, and before a certain quiet dinner one month back neither knew of the other’s existence.  Since then some chance meetings on the beach, the parade, the pier, a few long afternoon rows, between then and now:  these are the only nourishment the flame in either breast has received—­a flame kindled in a few long glances across the dinner-table.

But this afternoon he has laid aside the customary phrases and deliberately commenced the present conversation.

True, it is purely an abstract one—­all theory and hypotheses.  No one could say otherwise if it were repeated.  Not a personal word has been uttered on either side; but the girl feels in the determined tone of his voice, in the studied way he started it, in the cold precision with which he follows it, that it is practically a test conversation of herself, and that she is virtually passing through an examination.