And he was urging her to write home for money!  Why, she would not even have paid a visit in splendour to St. Luke’s Square.  Never should they know what she had suffered!  And especially her Aunt Harriet, from whom she had stolen!

“Will you write to your people?” he demanded yet again, emphasizing and separating each word.

“No,” she said shortly, with terrible disdain.

“Why not?”

“Because I won’t.”  The curling line of her lips, as they closed on each other, said all the rest; all the cruel truths about his unspeakable, inane, coarse follies, his laziness, his excesses, his lies, his deceptions, his bad faith, his truculence, his improvidence, his shameful waste and ruin of his life and hers.  She doubted whether he realized his baseness and her wrongs, but if he could not read them in her silent contumely, she was too proud to recite them to him.  She had never complained, save in uncontrolled moments of anger.

“If that’s the way you’re going to talk—­all right!” he snapped, furious.  Evidently he was baffled.

She kept silence.  She was determined to see what he would do in the face of her inaction.

“You know, I’m not joking,” he pursued.  “We shall starve.”

“Very well,” she agreed.  “We shall starve.”

She watched him surreptitiously, and she was almost sure that he really had come to the end of his tether.  His voice, which never alone convinced, carried a sort of conviction now.  He was penniless.  In four years he had squandered twelve thousand pounds, and had nothing to show for it except an enfeebled digestion and a tragic figure of a wife.  One small point of satisfaction there was—­and all the Baines in her clutched at it and tried to suck satisfaction from it—­their manner of travelling about from hotel to hotel had made it impossible for Gerald to run up debts.  A few debts he might have, unknown to her, but they could not be serious.

So they looked at one another, in hatred and despair.  The inevitable had arrived.  For months she had fronted it in bravado, not concealing from herself that it lay in waiting.  For years he had been sure that though the inevitable might happen to others it could not happen to him.  There it was!  He was conscious of a heavy weight in his stomach, and she of a general numbness, enwrapping her fatigue.  Even then he could not believe that it was true, this disaster.  As for Sophia she was reconciling herself with bitter philosophy to the eccentricities of fate.  Who would have dreamed that she, a young girl brought up, etc?  Her mother could not have improved the occasion more uncompromisingly than Sophia did—­ behind that disdainful mask.

“Well—­if that’s it ...!” Gerald exploded at length, puffing.  And he puffed out of the room and was gone in a second.

II