And yet he was going to marry her.

That was impressed on him by Flossie’s voice saying that if he wouldn’t decide which of those two rooms was to be their room, she must.  Because the men wanted to put up the bedstead.

It was an intimation that he was bound to her, not by any fine ties of feeling or of honour, but by a stout unbreakable chain of material facts.  He looked out of the window.  The vans were unloading in the street.  It seemed to him that there was something almost grossly compromising in the wash-stand, dumped down there in the garden; and as the bedstead was being borne into the house in portions, reverentially, processionally, he surrendered before that supreme symbol of finality.  As he had made his bed, he must lie; even if it was a brass bed with mother-o’-pearl ornaments; and he refused to listen to the inner voice which suggested that the bed was not made yet, it was not even paid for, and that he would be a fool to lie on it.  He turned sad eyes on the little woman so flushed and eager over her packages.  He had committed himself more deeply with every purchase they had made that day.  How carefully he had laboured at his own destruction.

He had gone so far with these absurd reflections, that when Flossie exclaimed, “There, after all I’ve forgotten the kitchen hammer,” his nerves relaxed their tension, and he experienced a sense of momentary but divine release.  And when she insisted on repairing her oversight as they went back, he felt that the kitchen hammer had clinched the matter; and that if only they had not bought it he might yet be free.

There was something in the Beaver’s building, after all.

CHAPTER LIX

He did not appear that evening, not even to listen to Lucia’s music, for his misery was heavy upon him.  Mercifully, he was able to forget it for a while in attending to the work that waited for him; an article for The Planet to be written; proofs to correct and manuscripts to look through for Metropolis; all neglected till the last possible moment, which moment had now come.  For once he reaped the benefit of his reckless habits of postponement.

But four hours saw him through it; and midnight recalled him to his care.  Instead of undressing he refilled his lamp, made up his fire, and drew his chair to the hearth.  There was a question, put off, too, like his work, from hour to hour, and silenced by the scuffling, meaningless movements of the day.  It related to the promise he had made to Lucia Harden at the end of their last interview.  He had then said to her that, since she desired it, she should know what it was that she had done for him.  Hitherto he had determined that she should not know it yet; not know it till death had removed from her his embarrassing, preposterous personality.  The gift of knowledge that she might have refused from the man, she could