“Will you let me have the money, George?  I will try to save in every way that I can.  I’ve made all the baby’s clothes, as it is, and I can easily make the few things I need, also.  Since the baby came I have stopped calling with your mother.”

A flush rose to his face.  “I know you’ve been a regular brick about money, Gabriella.  I never saw a woman buy as little as you do, and you always manage to look well dressed.”

She smiled with faint irony.  Her clothes were dowdy, for she had turned the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was wearing it in the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it seemed hardly fair to undeceive him.  Had she been any other woman, she reflected, he would probably have looked at her long enough to discover that she had grown decidedly shabby.

Since the baby’s birth, as she told him, she had stopped calling with her mother-in-law, and a black net dress, given her by Mrs. Fowler because it had grown too small in the waist, was still presentable enough for the family dinners.  But she never worried about her appearance, and it was a relief to find that George was quite as indifferent on the subject as she was.  In the days of their honeymoon he had been so particular that she had spent hours each day before the mirror.

“Will you let me have the money, George?” she asked again.  The form of the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in her voice:  the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge to her smile, a subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her speech.  George, looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of her profile, thought suddenly, “Gabriella is growing hard.”  He noticed, too, for the first time, that she looked older since the birth of the baby, that her bosom was fuller and that her figure, which had always been good, was now lovely in its long flowing lines.  She was handsomer than she had been before her marriage, for her complexion had become clearer since she had lived in the North, and though she was still pale, her skin was losing its sallow tone.

Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as a girl, she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses.  There were times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to him, for she had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed to him to be essential in the women with whom one fell in love.  But, however it had happened, still it had happened, and she was now his wife and the mother of the adorable Frances Evelyn.

“I’m awfully cut up about it, Gabriella,” he said, “but honestly I am out of the money.  I couldn’t lay my hands on it just now to save my life.”

His excuses convinced him while he uttered them, but he had barely paused before Gabriella demolished them with a single blow of her merciless logic.

“You were talking last night about buying a horse,” she replied.